Sunday, June 24, 2007

Geospatial articles in Wired magazine in July

I subscribe to Wired magazine, so receive the (paper) magazine shortly before it goes on general sale each month. In the July issue, geospatial technology gets heavy coverage. There is a four page article on Google Maps and Earth - "The Whole Earth, Cataloged: How Google Maps is changing the way we see the world". John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, is quoted a number of times. One snippet I hadn't heard before is that Google Earth was "inspired in part by the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash - the protagonist uses a software program called Earth, created by the 'Central Intelligence Corporation' and containing a 'perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth'". Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future and Michael Goodchild from UCSB are also quoted.

This is followed by a futuristic article by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling called "Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future - that's hyper as in linked and local as in location". The author writes about his imagined life in 2017, and describes himself as a "geoblogger" - hey, some of us are just ahead of our time :) !!

So check out Wired magazine in July!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I just returned home from an immersive week of geo at the UC to read the article too. It's great to see people who I know in the article, and it's scary that we're driving the future.

Peter, if you haven't read Snow Crash yet, I suggest you do. Great book. Stephenson is/was also a geographer. Glad he could be that mystery Jedi who put in the order for the clone army (us).