C'mon Google, seriously?

Mapperz Blog, a must read recently btw, reports on Google new to estimate traffic in their driving directions time estimate. Read the article here. How many layers of estimated data can be piled upon each other before people just start completely ignoring results? Let's see, we have the original street network geometry (1), the individual cells classifications (2), the speeds assigned to the classifications (3), the routing optimization methods (4), and now traffic volume estimates (6). If you roll a dice six times and add the total what do you get? Could be anything from 6 to 36. The answer is 21 then right? It halfway between the two possible extremes. What if I knew the first of the six dice was 5? Then the "answer" is 22.5 and somehow people think my guess is really good? I don't get it. Drivetime data sucks. Get over it people. Two people leaving the same spot at the same time don't even take the same amount of time to travel. You think some software can tell you what travel time will be?

Alright I'm done. I'm going to the beach to relax, apparently I need it...

Gizmodo article on Google's Camera Car fleet

Article here. Presumably they're for the Streetview functionality they added to Google Maps recently, but with Google, who knows what they're up to.

Timoney Group at it again.

I remember being impressed by the way they used Google Earth before. Well now they've impressed again. Check them out making BLM, Oil and Gas Wells, and Federal Lands info available as KML for the Rocky Mountain states here: http://www.rockiesog.com/

What's really impressive about this is the way they take advantage of new KML spec including the Regions functionality to stream out huge amounts of data, from huge databases, at a very good speed. That shows it's possible for datasets that used to be only practical as fusion built layers to be shared as streamed static kml instead.

A discussion of this point is at Ogle Earth.

Data Visualization Site

Many Eyes

Very cool site that visualizes data in many ways. Users can upload data and explore it in different ways. Someone posted what looks like a grocery store's sales by dept which was very interesting to view as sized bubbles (sorry no link, site broke as I went back to get the link -- hey, it's in beta still). What brought me to the site was a series of political earmark spending visualized. The interface was very adept at switching between per capita, total, by category, and whatever other types of visualizations I ignored.

Different Real Estate Web Site

Terabitz

It's very Web2.0. I like that it's a different approach to the same old task. There are things to consider here. Also, I like that it takes non-real estate info and will plot it along side it. And, btw, it's using Google's Maps API for the maps.