My Google Map Blog

Over the years we've seen some great uses of geography in news and advertising, going back as far as 2006 when Saturn used Google Earth to help show off their new car, the Aura. Another great example was a few years ago when Adidas "destroyed" homes using Google Earth.

Of course, with the good comes the bad, and the folks at GIS Lounge have posted a list with some of the biggest geography bloopers of all time.

My favorite was back in 2010, when CNN was seeing some blurry imagery in Google Earth and assumed that Google was controlling it in real-time so that we couldn't see police activity surrounding an attempted car bombing. Google Earth, of course, is no where near real-time and won't be for quite a few years (here's how their imagery works). What made this remarkable was that the person most confused by this was Tom Fuentes, the former FBI Assistant Director of International Relations, who really should have known better. You can read more about that exchange over on Geekosystem.

Their post includes a handful of other noteworthy entires, all of which you can find at gislounge.com/geography-bloopers.

What do you think was the biggest blooper of all time?

(via +Adam Simmons)

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Google Earth Outreach is an amazing organization that helps nonprofits visualize their cause and help tell their story in Google Earth and Google Maps. We've shown you many examples of these organizations over the years (some of which are listed in our recent post about Rebecca Moore).

Similar to the issues that Kenya faced in the 1970s and 80s, elephant poaching is once again becoming big business. Save The Elephants is an organization out of Samburu, Kenya that is using Google Earth to help track and protect these elephants. In short:

Within Samburu -- and other places in Africa -- we provide a tracking system which uses GPS radio collars to monitor the movements of elephants in near real time. Using Google Earth and our new, lightweight mobile apps, our team can be deeply knowledgeable about the Samburu elephants, and share data with the guardians to come to their aid if needed. Alerts tell us when unusual conditions occur. The most serious alert concerns immobility. This too often means another poaching incident, and another elephant's life lost to runaway demand for ivory.

While the issues that they're directly fighting are in Kenya, the problem exists across much of Africa. To help with that, they've released the Elephants in Peril site, which uses Fusion Tables and the Google Maps Engine to help compile data and search for trends.

They're facing quite a battle in stopping these poachers, but the products they're using combine to form a powerful weapon against them. Learn more in this post on the Google Lat Long Blog.

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