Google Street View Maps: How it impacts journalism
Yesterday, Google released a street view node to its already-powerful online mapping tool. Essentially, you can now see photos of streets, landmarks, buildings and people who happened to be in the shot when it was taken for any location in the first set of beta cities: Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco.
Photos are interactive and 360-degrees, allowing you to virtually roam through your destination. Rumor has it that very soon, there will be a video option with either live shots or feeds from YouTube.
116th & Broadway in NYC. That building on the right is the Columbia J-school. (Dunno the guy in the orange shirt.)
It was Amazon's A9.com search engine (now OpenSearch) that originally tested photo/map mashups within search, and believe it or not that was nearly two years ago. And to be fair, Microsoft's Virtual Earth already has a similar program with street views in more than 50 cities.)
Google partnered with Immersive Media, a Calgary, Canada-based company. Immersive has already collected and mapped close to 40,000 miles of streets in 35 U.S. cities so far and is currently collecting data in Europe, South Africa, Asia and North America. A camera the company calls a "dodecahedron" has "twelve symmetrical pentagonal facets [and] is the most natural geometric division of a sphere for immersive image capture."
What does this mean for journalism? Potentially a lot.
Picture a disaster scene. You're a broadcast reporter for your local television station and because you have to wrangle your photographer, producer and get out to the van with all of the necessary equipment, it takes you about 15 minutes to get to the scene. Once you're there, it will take an additional 3 - 5 minutes to get to your spot, set up, check your hair and teeth and to start rolling. If the story was breaking in any city I've lived in and if I was at my office at the time, I'd need to add on a minimum of 5 - 10 minutes because of traffic. All told, it might take 30 minutes to wrap a live stand-up shot.
But now the video would air with an anchor and there may or may not be time to produce a map to show my location. And because it's TV, your viewer wouldn't be able to click on any links...she'd have to move to her computer to do that, and in all likelihood, the station's site won't have been updated immediately with new research and blogging tools.
Here's why Street View matters to our industry: In that same disaster scene, a citizen journalist might be nearby with a video-enabled phone, a digi-camera or camera phone or possibly even a mini-digital handicam. It would literally take her seconds to snap pics with her phone and email it back to her editor, who could embed a photo-map into a written story with links. If she had a video-enabled phone, she could send that and essentially have an interactive video story, live from the scene, with an instant ability to solicit additional reporting from others in the area. If that hyperlocal citizen network subscribed to a service like TextMarks, an SMS notice could be sent to all mobile phones and everyone in the area could then begin collecting content and sending back to the reporter's home base.
Consider my sister and I as possible examples: I'm a geek, and I'm never without my BlackBerry (camera, web, email), my laptop (I can use my BlackBerry to get online from anywhere - even the remote Jordanian desert), my digital camera, my audio recorder and my Sony Handicam. Although I don't carry it, I also have a nifty tripod that can bend in any direction and attach itself to virtually any surface. So if I was on the scene, I could set up a camera and my phone, get footage and then head to shelter and upload it using my laptop. Assuming I didn't edit anything, I would have broken the story ahead of every conventional news outfit - I guarantee it.
Now I realize that I'm an aberration. But consider my sister, who's an opera singer and rarely carries anything besides her iPod (classical music or Coldplay), a large wallet of makeup and her camera/video enabled mobile phone. She could easily capture digital footage and post it to YouTube, which might then be integrated into a Google Map.
Yes, Google released an API allowing all of us to create maps with photos. But in this case, video changes the picture.
Click below to watch an informative, if not animaesque, demo video.
