Is your house in one of these photos?
I wanted to tell you about a cool site. This is not really “new”, as I’m sure many of you already know about this site, but, for those who don’t, there’s a cool search site call A9 – located at www.a9.com. Now, you may have to register for this site as it belongs to Amazon.com. The upside is they give you a small discount on purchases if you use this site. Anyway…
What was rather cool was the map utility, located at maps.a9.com. If you go there, you’ll see a small list of cities. Click on Atlanta and you’ll see a map with a magnifying glass icon over a street. If you check the “Mark Streets Containing BlockView™ Images” at the upper left, you get to see streets with actual pictures, left and right, of the places along the root you’ve chosen. Find a location you want to investigate and you can see photos of the left and right side of the street.
It’s sort of cool and sort of scary but, hey, we’re in the 21st century where privacy is just a neat concept. (just ask the Justice Department). Just a little note tonight as I work among my many computer monitors.
Dude! That’s really cool! I’ve seen Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and MapQuest, but I’ve still never seen this! Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, the A9 stuff has been out there a while, but I don’t think a lot of people have seen it.
Also note that Atlanta is among the cities where Microsoft’s Live Local is showing “bird’s eye view” photos in their maps:
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=33.734711~-84.341809&style=o&lvl=1&scene=1412817&sp=adr.715%20Flat%20Shoals%20Ave%20SE%2c%20Atlanta%2c%20GA%2030316
Unlike satellite mapping, these are done by low-flying airplanes and are just plain freaky.
I remember when this first came out messing with it (to select the best image of a friend’s restaurant to be be the one that showed up in the restaurant search results).
I never looked or my house, but its there in the middle of some renovation, with my car in the driveway and our painter’s truck out front.
Found my house but it’s from at least 2 years ago. At least they didn’t catch me burying bodies in the back like Google Earth did.