Florida map and travel information

Things looking brighter for color blind

2009-10-09T06:05:00.000-07:00

What connects Paul Newman, Jack Nicklaus, Bing Crosby. Keanu Reeves and Prince William? Well, not much, except that they are all color blind.

It's hard to imagine how the world must look to someone who is color blind, but at least it seems normal to them.

Color blindness is the inability to perceive differences between some of the colors that others can distinguish. It is most often of genetic nature, but may also occur because of eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals. Check out the wiki entry here

One of the setbacks for them, one of many it might be said, is the trouble they have reading maps. The traditional rainbow of cartographic colours – green for grass-land and trees, red for main roads and public footpaths, and blue for major road routes and rivers – can become indistinguishable, therefore making map reading extremely difficult.

Help may be on the way though, thanks to a new product from mapping agency Ordnance Survey in Britain that can be specifically styled to make mapping easier on the colour-blind eye.

OS spokesman Paul Beauchamp said: “Cartography is a fine art, but the colours that have become so familiar to most of us are actually among the worst possible choices for those with colour blindness. By using our new mapping product, called OS VectorMap Local, councils and businesses will be able to create styles especially for colour-blind people that we hope will make life easier.”

Below are two images, one of how the map would look to someone who is not color blind, the other how it would look for those with the condition.

Another dimension in virtual maps

2009-09-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

Google Earth is cool right? Well, yeah, but there are certain things they could do to make it just that little bit cooler. Such as adding live video to the images, making the Earth appear a bit more populated.
This new development comes from the clever folk at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who are presenting results of a recent project - "Augmenting Aerial Earth Maps with Dynamic Information".
That does admittedly make it sound quite dull but it's a really quite exciting development for the likes of Google Maps. Using crowd-sourced video footage, the team has managed to create a "dynamic alive city" with cars, clouds, football players and even people moving around in their virtual little world.
Check out the video below.

Map found, history uncovered

2009-08-20T06:45:00.000-07:00

You can't lose something you don't know you ever had. But the serendipity of finding something you never knew you owned is always a pleasure.
Take the tale of the librarian at Oxford University's Queen's College who recently uncovered two remarkable treasures which had lain unknown among its manuscripts since at least the 18th century.
It turned out that they dated from 1816 and while no further details were available the librarian, Veronika Vernier, traced them to the cartographer, Joao Teixeira.
According to the Times Higher supplement, Nick Millea, map librarian at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, directed Miss Vernier to a six-volume "bible" of Portuguese cartography.
Mr Millea told THS that the atlases were "stunningly attractive" and "a very important find, because so few copies of this material exist and the ones at Queen's look almost new".
"It's great that they found them and that they were able to work out just how important they are," he added. "You don't get discoveries like this every day or even every year: I don't remember anything of similar quality turning up at Oxford since I joined the Bodleian in 1992."
It just goes to show, sometimes you can find something you weren't looking for and discover real treasure.

There really is only one company to trust with your Anna Maria Island vacation, and only one website you need to visit. Click on www.annamaria.com for the very best in vacation rentals on the island. From two-bed cottages, to huge homes for the whole family, waterside, gulf front, secluded, we have it all.

Mapping history in Spain

2009-08-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

Check out this story from the Daily Mail website - a British newspaper which specialises in stories such as this.

It says: We all rely on maps, be they the sat nav in your car or a traditional A-Z, and archaeologists have found our ancient ancestors were no different.
They have unearthed what they believe to be the oldest map in Western Europe, in a Spanish cave steeped in legend.
The complex etchings were engraved on a hand-sized rock 13,660 years ago, probably by Magdalenian hunter-gatherers.
Read more here and enjoy the images which do make for compelling evidence for a cogent argument.

Want to know about maps of Florida? Want to see lots of maps of Florida? You really should be looking at www.luddist.com - maps of Florida is just what we do

Polar-ized vision of Earth's climate

2009-07-28T05:45:00.000-07:00

Climate change is one of those black-and-white topics of conversation which tend to get people all hot and bothered, if you'll pardon the expression. Some of the evidence is quite damning, however, as the images highlighted in this article which appeared in the online magazine ITWire (www.itwire.com) is anything to go by.
Writer David Heath sets the scene...

Sometimes America's spy satellites have to pass over 'friendly territory.' When they do, they can still be put to good use – in this case, monitoring sea ice for evidence of climate change.
In the past few days, the US Government has de-classified and released via the United States Geological Survey website a number of very high resolution images showing exceedingly clear evidence of warming in the Arctic.
Now, I don't know if these images have had their resolution decreased, but I thought that spy satellites were capable of much higher than the stated 1 metre resolution. No matter.
The first example (warning, all these images are at least 20MB) shows the seashore around Barrow. Barrow is on the northern coastline of Alaska and is completely locked in by ice during the northern winter. By July of each year, the ice has melted sufficiently to allow barge access to bring supplies from the south. The first image in this set shows the state of the ice in July 2006, with the sea ice situated around 800m to 1000m off the coast. The second image, just one year later, shows no sea ice at all within the image's 3000m of offshore coverage.
The next example, of the Beaufort Sea, approximately 200km north east of Barrow, shows a substantial loss of summer open-sea ice. Whereas the first image, in August 2001, shows a mass of sea ice with a degree of melting, the second image, in August 2007 shows open sea, with minor, small patches of ice – clearly melting.
These two pairs of images display an alarming change in the proximity and amount of sea ice over a relatively short time.

Read the full article here

Don't just visit Anna Maria Island, stay here. For the very best in vacation rental properties visit www.1annamaria.com and spend your vacation in a real home from home.

A giant leap for Google

2009-07-21T05:24:00.000-07:00

Google has added an interactive 3D terrain and landscape map of the moon to Google Earth as the internet giant celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings. You can now experience a tiny little bit of what it must have felt like to actually be there.
Users will need to latest version of Google Earth, 5.0 and they will be able to follow the footsteps of astronauts Jack Schmitt, the last of the Apollo astronauts to arrive and set foot on the Moon, and Buzz Aldrin and the flight of the rover during their trip online.
Michael Weiss-Malik, Product manager of Moon in Google Earth, said: "Forty years ago, two human beings walked on the Moon. Starting today, with Moon in Google Earth, it's now possible for anyone to follow in their footsteps."
Read more of the article in IT Pro Portal here and download the latest version of Google Earth here

Don't just visit Anna Maria Island, stay here. For the very best in vacation rental properties visit www.1annamaria.com and spend your vacation in a real home from home.

What is a henge anyway?

2009-07-14T05:03:00.000-07:00

Get on your trikes ladies and gentlemen of Google, you're off to see the best sights and sites Britain has to offer.
According to Webuser online magazine, Google has announced the six British tourist destinations that will be photographed extensively for Google Maps Street View.
It says: The six winners, as chosen by the public through an online poll organised by Google and tourism agency Visit Britain, will each be visited by the Google Trike, an 18-stone tricycle mounted with a camera and powered by a Google tricyclist.
Along with the six winners, which are Stonehenge, the Millennium Stadium, the Angel of the North, Loch Ness, the Eden Project and Warwick Castle, Visit Britain chose Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland as the 'wildcard' entry.
If you fancy an early look, here's what Stonehenge looks like...

Don't just visit Anna Maria Island, stay here. For the very best in vacation rental properties visit http://www.annamaria.com/ and spend your vacation in a real home from home.

Map your way to a new home

2009-07-07T03:11:00.000-07:00

Google Inc. has unveiled a new feature that will let users in Australia and New Zealand search for property listings on its mapping service, a move that could pit the company against established online real estate services.
Google's new tool will enable real-estate agents and publishers to upload their listings into its database, allowing buyers and renters to link directly to property listings displayed on the Google's maps.
The free service is available only down under at the moment, but Australia's The Age reported that Google is poised to roll it out in the U.S. as well.
Google said in a blog post that people were increasingly using the internet to search for a home to buy or rent. Its new service will allow buyers and renters to refine their searches by neighborhood, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, available parking and price.
Each result would appear as a marker on a map, giving users a sense of the distribution of the properties for sale or rent. That means searchers could quickly find available properties that are close to, for example, a specific school.
Users could then click on a marker to get more detailed information about the property, including the listing agent's Web site and contact details.
Sounds like a good idea, all that needs to happen now is for the housing market to pick up and we can start actually using it...

Don't just visit Anna Maria Island, stay here. For the very best in vacation rental properties visit www.amisland.com and spend your vacation in a real home from home.

A very English country garden

2009-06-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

All eyes - in the tennis world at least - are focused on a small part of London, England at the moment, with the second week of Wimbledon under way.
The grass courts are something of an institution over there, and that is for a very good reason. The BBC website has a very interesting blog posting dedicated to the small patches of turf which make SW19 such a famous London zip code.
It goes: The English lawn was invented in the early 17th Century as a way for the Jacobean gentry to assert their superiority. Hugely labour intensive, only the wealthiest and most powerful could afford to maintain the immaculate turf.
The traditional use of sheep or other livestock to graze pasture lacked the precision to create the closely-cut finish that amazed the rival gardeners of France and beyond. The perfect lawn was hand-produced by scything and shearing the grass.
With the invention of the mowing machine in 1830, the lawn escaped the bonds of England's great estates and became a key component of the Victorian enthusiasm for games, sports and pastimes.
Croquet, cricket, bowls and lawn tennis required immaculate grass playing surfaces and the art of lawn-making was developed and exported around the world along with imperial expansion.
However, domestic dominance was largely retained because a key component of a soft lawn is soft weather - drizzly English rain.
In the 20th Century the United States, in keeping with its acquired super-power status, mobilised the masses to defy this meteorological handicap and strive for global lawn domination.
The American Garden Club convinced its members that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful lawn: "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green and neatly edged".
In suburban Britain, no garden was complete without its square of striped green, tended to within an inch of its life. The lawn had become a ubiquitous part of the English landscape, as this map of Wimbledon from 1933 shows.

Just look at the lawns on some of those houses.

New maps show HIV levels in real time

2009-06-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

This from the wires:
ATLANTA (AP) — A new internet data map offers a first-of-its-kind, county-level look at HIV cases in the U.S. and finds the infection rates tend to be highest in the South.
It also finds the infection is concentrated in about 20 percent of American counties, with the highest numbers of cases in population centers like New York and California.
However, parts of the South appear especially hard-hit by the virus. More than half the 48 counties with the highest rates of the AIDS-causing infection were in Georgia.
The map was put together by the National Minority Quality Forum, a nonprofit research organization that has done other disease maps.
Check out the map here http://www.maphiv.org/

Maps help cops catch crooks

2009-06-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

It just had to happen some time. Google Maps has had its first major arrest, thanks to images taken from one of the 360degree vehicles.
The cops from Groningen contacted Google to ask for the original images taken by their Street View camera car after a robbery victim told them he had seen the suspects on the mapping website.
When they received the un-blurred photos of three men matching the descriptions given by the 14-year-old victim, they moved in and arrested the gang.
A police spokesperson explained the unusual procedure leading to the arrests: "You must tell Google clearly why you want [the photos]. For us, it is unique."
Quite. And not quite what the inventors had in mind when they created it, but it's just another feather in their cap.

Coming to a trail near you

2009-06-12T02:20:00.000-07:00

We are all used to the Google vans driving around the country, mapping our neighborhoods for its "Street View" application.
But now Google Maps is expanding to biking and hiking trails: a Google employee on a tricycle actually rides around to snap the same wide-area views as the vans.
"Much of the world is inaccessible to the car," says Daniel Ratner, a Google senior engineer who designed the trike. "We want to get access to places people find important."
So far, only a bike trail in Monterey, Calif., is up and running but Google right now has cyclists out now in California, Italy and the United Kingdom. The company says to look for hiking and biking images from those locations over the summer — along with shots from US theme parks.
There were many complaints about Google invading our privacy with the unblinking eyes of its cameras, but Stephen Chau, a product manager for Google Maps, says that what the Google cars picked up photographically was no different from what any tourist would see on vacation.
"We show images that are taken from public streets," he says. Chau says the complaints about the product are minimal considering its usage, and many people just have an initial misunderstanding. "We have tools to automatically blur faces, if they show up, and license plates."
Additionally, homeowners who object to their homes being shown can contact Google and request removal. Wonder if the same applies for any disgruntled squirrels on some of these bike trails...

Not so lonely anymore

2009-06-02T05:14:00.000-07:00

Never underestimate the power of the internet. And that goes for you too Kim Jong Il.
According to a story on the Sydney Morning Herald website, a group of amateur spies has used Google Earth to provide a rare glimpse inside North Korea, one of the world's most secretive countries.
By default the Google Earth map of North Korea is completely bare, with no roads or landmarks labelled. Over two years, US doctoral student Curtis Melvin and other volunteers pored over news reports, images, accounts, books and maps painstakingly identifying and locating thousands of buildings, monuments, missile-storage facilities, mass graves, secret labour camps, palaces, restaurants, tourist sites, main roads and even the entrance to the country's subterranean nuclear test base.
The result, North Korea Uncovered, is one of the most detailed maps of North Korea available to the public today. The small file, which can be installed on top of Google Earth, has been downloaded more than 47,000 times since an updated version was released last month.
Among the most notable findings is the site of mass graves created in the 1990s following a famine that the UN estimates killed about two million people.
"We have portrayed things about which they are most proud and ashamed," Melvin said in an email interview.
More power to you Curtis, keep up the good work!

Check out the best in Anna Maria vacation rentals at www.annamaria.com

Map the Fallen launched

2009-05-26T04:05:00.000-07:00

The little yellow dots look a bit like those maps they have in power stations, showing where the lights are on and off across America.
But look a little closer and you can see that each one is a little human figure. Zoom further and the details of each is revealed - these are each of the US servicemen to have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of the war on terror.
The project, known as Map the Fallen, shows where, when and how each military officer from the U.S. and coalition forces died since the start of the war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.
Created by a Google Earth engineer in his free time, the map draws a line across the world linking each service member’s home town to the place they died serving their country.
Zooming in on a target home town reveals yellow figures, which represent the soldiers, positioned on the Google Earth view among recognisable points of interest. Scrolling over the figures triggers a pop-up box with the soldier's name and age.
There are also links to obituaries and memorial sites for the war heroes, with messages from families and friends.
Google engineer Sean Askay sourced data from the first death - on October 10 2001 - up until March this year.

It's a bit of a grizzly reminder of the human cost of the war, but at least gives us the chance to leave messages of respect to those who have fallen.

You can view the site at www.mapthefallen.org/

Traffic caught on camera

2009-05-22T04:33:00.000-07:00

Being stuck in traffic is no fun. Wouldn't it be nice to see where the trouble spots were before you got there?
Well, lucky Florida residents, now you can. TrafficLand has just announced an agreement with the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) to integrate traffic video from five major markets across the state into its national network of nearly 7,000 traffic cameras.
TrafficLand is to install its IP video equipment at FDOT Operation Centers in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando. Live video from the FDOT cameras will be available to the public on TrafficLand’s free website at www.trafficland.com
The TrafficLand public website uses interactive maps showing traffic camera locations, which users click to view live video streams. Users can save customized camera displays, schedule emails with live images from selected cameras, access cameras by Web-enabled mobile devices and even set up traffic camera Widgets on personalized home pages or blogs.
Take a look. And if the jams are on your way home from work, at least you'll get to see where you'll be spending the next few hours.

Sentinel maps Florida fires

2009-05-19T04:51:00.000-07:00

The News Illustrated section of the Sun-Sentinel site is often quite fascinating. This week's blog entry is no different, and should come as a delight to map lovers. Unfortunately the subject matter is not exactly good news, but it is interesting none the less.
The map shows how many fires have occurred in Florida since January 1. The red flame icons indicate how many have burned since Saturday, May 9 to indicate why there had been interstate closures in recent days. There are also larger maps of the Naples and Palm Beach County areas, so you can see clearly how many fires we've had lately. If you're interested in seeing the latest conditions, check out the U.S. Forestry Division's site to see how many more fires are burning in the Sunshine State.
Click here to read the full story.

Space, the final frontier for Google

2009-05-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

It's hard to keep up with Google these days. No sooner do they bring out one innovation using the latest technology to map out the planet, than they set their eyes to the sky.Only this time they want us to look up as well.
From now on, amateur astronomers will be able to tell the difference between Mercury and Mars by simply pointing their camera-phones at the night sky and clicking a button.
The Google software, called Star Droid, uses GPS technology found in most new handsets to identify the position of the user and then compares this with existing maps of space. It automatically attaches name tags to the stars and planets that can be seen through the phone’s viewfinder.
The application, which could be launched as early as this week, is also likely to identify the object’s distance from Earth and its position within a constellation.
Astronomers hope Google’s technology, which will be free to download from the internet, will help to inspire and educate a new generation of stargazers.
The company’s critics, however, will no doubt see Google’s move into space as further evidence of its omnipresence. Some have already half-jokingly referred to its latest product as Google Universe.

All of a sudden, Mexico doesn't seem that far away

2009-05-01T01:41:00.000-07:00

Another day, another Google map of the spread of swine flu. This one comes courtesy of http://www.guardian.co.uk/ blogger Bobbie Johnson. It shows the intensity of the affected areas and is actually really rather interesting.

Bobbie writes:

Over the past couple of years, those very clever people at Google.org have been trying to build early-warning systems for diseases - by tracking trends in the data that Google sees in order to build up a picture of whether people are succumbing to certain symptoms.
The US data on Flu Trends has been going since last autumn - but now, given the concern over swine flu, they're also mapping information in Mexico with a new, experimental system.
Engineers admit that it's not perfect, but they do think there's something to be learned from the information:
We cannot be fully confident that the data is correct because we don't have enough historical surveillance data for Mexico against which to compare and calibrate our estimates. Although we cannot validate our estimates as we did for Flu Trends for U.S., we have seen that Google users in Mexico also search for flu-related topics when they experience flu-related symptoms. We are cautiously optimistic that the graphs reflect actual flu activity. The system detected an increase in Mexico City before major news coverage.

Take a look at the map below.

Google maps out spread of infection

2009-04-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

If you are worried about the spread of swine flu into America, then keep an eye on this Google Map, created to show where the infected cases are being treated.

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Spread the word on online map of the world

2009-04-24T04:11:00.000-07:00

Want to tell everyone how great Anna Maria Island is? Why not get on to MapVivo and spread the word.
Online start-up MapVivo has unveiled a web application enabling users to share travel experiences by linking destination information, images and video to a pin on a map.
The company, which received funding from a private investor in February, is planning to use the tool as the springboard to a social travel platform enabling users to plan trips, meet up and share travel information.
The application available from the Mapvivo website and users can also post their travel itineraries directly into Facebook or Twitter or share them via e-mail.
Co-founder Mark Seall declined to reveal the level of investment but said it had enabled the company to employ a small development team to work on future site enhancements and content.
He added that investment would go towards further improving the social elements of the site by allowing members to comment and ask questions about journeys and generally interact more.
A mobile application is also in the pipeline for users to update their details on the move as well as trawl the trips database for existing relevant information.
Further enhancements are also planned for the journey creation and search functionality.
The company sees opportunity in social travel tools to influence purchase decisions as sites such as Facebook gain ground over Tripadvisor in the UK in terms of upstream booking referrals.

New Zealand, new names

2009-04-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting story from the other side of the world. It concerns New Zealand, or rather it concerns the two islands which make up the large part of New Zealand.
According to the Telegraph newspaper, a discovery by officials that the existing names had never been adopted in law has increased pressure from Maori nationalists for the names to be dropped.
However, some opposed to the idea criticised the suggestion as "political correctness of the worst kind".
The New Zealand Geographic Board, the statutory body charged with gazetting placenames, said it stumbled on the anomaly after a member of the public proposed changing the name of South Island to Te Wai Pounamu, the Maori alternative.
The Maori name means "place of greenstone" after the island's outcrops of jade, from which tribes traditionally crafted weapons and jewellery.
Maori know North Island as Te Ika a Maui or "the fish of Maui", based on a legend about how the god Maui hauled the island up from the sea while fishing.
"The English names North and South Island are not official," said Don Grant, the board's chairman.
"They had appeared in maps for a long time, but they were not official."
Dr Grant said the board would consult Maori tribes in the next few weeks, then put up suggestions to the wider public in 2010.
He said the Maori names might run in tandem with today's or could even replace them altogether.
Hone Harawhira, an outspoken Maori Party MP, said: "It's time to drop the North Island, South Island. Those names don't have any connotation except these people are too dumb to work it out for themselves."

Long arm of the Latitude

2009-04-17T02:39:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting tale from the mobile phone review website www.phonesreview.co.uk which is keen to point out the benefits of Google's controversial Latitude application.

A few months ago Google Maps launched Latitude, and apparently according to a report over at techcrunch, this piece of Google software has helped a San Francisco lady regain her purse which had been stolen by thieves.
Janina Valiente’s Google Maps sporting BlackBerry Bold was in her purse when it was stolen, so Janina called her sister who had permission to see her Latitude position and the info was passed to the police who were able to track down the thief.
So, just goes to show having Google’s Latitude installed on your smartphone can come in handy in more ways than you’d expect.

They might have a point. Of course the flip side is that for those of us who are not criminals, the police and everyone else can know where we are all the time as well. Like most things Google does, Latitude seems to be either loved or hated. Which side of the fence do you sit on?

A sign of the times...

2009-04-14T05:46:00.000-07:00

It's always nice when your town's local tourism agency recognises your importance to visitors to the area. Not nice, then, when they completely leave you off the map given to those tourists as happened to a small town in Scotland recently.
But then, another blow.
Just weeks after a town was left off a regional tourism map, its fragile sense of identity has suffered another blow. A sign welcoming visitors to Saltney has mysteriously vanished, apparently stolen to be sold off for scrap.
Saltney mayor, Cllr Klaus Armstrong-Braun, said: "This time it seems we have physically disappeared from the map."
Cllr Armstrong-Braun recently attacked tourism chiefs behind the North Wales Borderlands Wander and Wonder attractions guide map.
He branded the decision to leave Saltney off the map "lame, idiotic, diabolical and pathetic".
The brochure has been produced jointly by Flintshire, Wrexham and Denbighshire councils.
A spokesman for the publication said: "The main intention of the map is to give visitors general assistance in locating a specific attraction and is not designed as a definitive road map.
"Not every settlement is located on the map and in general we include places which have a known attraction or accommodation provision."
Well, funnily enough, all this publicity has probably put Saltney on the map more than it could have possibly imagined. Every cloud has a silver lining then.

Google Earth maps quake effects

2009-04-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

Thankfully we don't suffer with them in Florida as they do in, say, San Francisco, but the people of Italy have again been at the center of another earthquake disaster in the past few days.
More than 200 people have died after a powerful earthquake hit central Italy on Monday. The quake, with a magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale, hit the city of L'Aquila, 60 miles from Rome. Thanks to an application using Google Maps, you can see a map of the area showing the epicentre and where several of the aftershocks have hit.Not only that, you can also see how earthquakes are taking place around the world and be amazed at just how many there are.Check out the website here

Bucks village bucks the trend

2009-04-03T03:47:00.000-07:00

Google Maps rules the world, right? Well, wrong. For the residents of Buckinghamshire village of Broughton, in England, they don't.
Apparently not everyone wants to feature on Google's world-changing application, Street View. Here's the story in full from the Guardian website www.guardian.co.uk For the full story click here

Maev Kennedy writes:
Any villains inspired to check Google Street View to see whether a personal visit to the Buckinghamshire village of Broughton might be profitable, have been confounded. The residents formed a human hoarding to block the camera's view of their streets, then forced its vehicle into ignominious retreat.
In the satellite images on Google maps the village looks jolly nice: back gardens the size of small parks, swimming pools, tennis courts, two cars parked outside most of the large houses, a smart pink parasol behind one house on London Road.
But a note on the Google website says, of Broughton, "no street view", a sign that usually means the area has not yet been added to the millions of photographs that now reveal aspects of towns across nine countries and three continents - in brick-by-brick detail.
In fact, once Paul Jacobs spotted the Google camera when he glanced out his window on Wednesday, the photographers did not get far. The car was an unmarked black Opel, but the 360-degree camera on the roof was a bit of a giveaway. Jacobs rushed round banging on neighbours' doors, and soon had a posse surrounding the driver. When one of the residents called the police, there was a swift U-turn. Jacobs said there had been three burglaries in the last six weeks: "If our houses are plastered all over Google, it's an invitation for more criminals to strike."
Google was inundated with complaints of privacy being invaded in the days after it launched the British street view service.
A Google spokeswomansaid householders were entitled to request their property be removed from the site, and that the site blurred faces and car number plates, so did not break privacy laws.