These are some of the questions I was curious about during my blogging sabbatical:
What happens when a website goes cold?
Which archived entries will become the most popular?
How will idleness affect search engine algorithms?
What will the daily traffic be on this cobweb?
I never formally gave up blogging here. Instead, I simply added the text “i’m currently on daily blogging sabbatical, but i’ll be back very soon.” to the top of the page in the spring of 2011.
I essentially created a digital snapshot-in-time. Looking back at the chronological edit archive, I added a few entries in the spring 2012 & backdated them to the summer 2011, but from then on, it’s been intentionally silent on this website. I was curious about what would happen when this website was paused.
Most websites go offline, but few go on pause. It’s much easier to start a free blog on Tumblr than it is to have your own domain name, purchase a website hosting package, install the content management system, and keep everything running smoothly. Pause also costs money, and in my case, to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year. From dozens of domain names to the hosting package that keeps all the websites running, keeping my small stake of land on the World Wide Web has been both time-consuming and expensive. But it has also been quite rewarding to have this digital time capsule alive and online, albeit collecting dust.
Over the last few years much of my attention has gone to updating different websites that I was paid to manage. This made the intentional neglect of this website much easier to handle. I also never set a specific date that I would return because I didn’t want to be arbitrarily pressured to end my blogging sabbatical.
In lieu of posting new content here, I’ve also kept a secondary scrapbook during these silent years that includes some of my more memorable accomplishments, creations, and endeavors. Over the coming days & weeks I plan to regularly add new entries to the archives in order reflect what has transpired over the last few years. Concurrently, I also plan on recoding the layout of this website because it’s in desperate need of a makeover.
Welcome back! Pardon the dust.
Google Street View of Washington, DC suffers from out-dated imagery
|| 11/6/2008 || 5:53 pm || Comments Off on Google Street View of Washington, DC suffers from out-dated imagery || ||
As a cutesy election day surprise, Google announced the release of their Street View feature for the Google Maps of Washington, DC. For the last year and a half I’ve been waiting for Google Maps to include the city I live in, while at the same time planning my next installment of my geopolitical art project Google Street View IED , the first google bomb for Street View.
In June of 2007, around the time Street View was first released, Washington, DC’s imagery was “updated” with newer aerial photography from 2005. However, the central business district of Washington, DC continues to this day being shown using out-dated imagery from 2002, and the rest of the District is being shown using the newer imagery from September 2005. In the time since this”update”, even after I assisted in exposing this passive censorship in the Washington Post, the imagery has not been updated and because of this the new Street View feature suffers.
In the screen grab above you are being shown the massive parking lot known as City Center which was the site of the former convention center. The old convention center was imploded in December of 2004, which makes a gross mismatch. By using outdated imagery the convention center is still being shown on the Google Map, but the Street View imagery shows a completely different temporal view. The disturbing part of all of this is that the USGS imagery is completely available to anyone in the world to download. It’s already being used by Google Maps for the rest of Washington, DC and I’ve been using in my maps as well.
So, Google, when are you going to update your imagery? If its for security reasons, why release Street View? This provides far more “on the ground” information the aerial views profide. Please tell your content providers that the imagery of Washington, DC deserves an update so you can better serve your customers. Maybe you can use your new satellite?
Related Google Maps Entries:
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