Google Earth: Protecting Canada’s Coast

The Living Oceans Society is focused on protecting Canada’s Pacific coast from risks such as oil spills, salmon aquaculture and other industrial activity. As part of that, they’ve recently created an interactive map using the Google Earth Plug-in that focus on the oil risk for the coast.

 

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Enbridge, operator of the world’s longest crude oil and liquids pipeline, is planning the “Northern Gateway Pipelines Project”, which would create two pipelines between Alberta’s tar sands and a marine terminal in Kitimat, B.C. Once complete, roughly 220 supertankers would sail the area waters each year.

The Living Oceans map is an attempt to show a massive amount of data expressing the risk to the North Coast if the project goes through.

Visitors can view photos and facts about ecological features like salmon streams and eelgrass beds, critical orca habitat and sea lion haulouts. Other layers show the human presence on the coast, such as areas important for sport fishing and log harvesting and the locations of past marine accidents. Also available are layers showing local opposition to the proposed tankers, including the proposed tanker ban area. Through it all run Enbridge’s proposed tanker routes.

Regardless which side you support in a fight like this, Living Oceans Society has done a great job of using Google Earth to support their side.

Cantabrigian Namesakes

Andy’s made a great looking map of small-multiples showing the breakdown of how streets were named in Cambridge, MA. Those of you familiar with the area will have fun trying to recognize the highlighted streets. Everyone else can marvel at how useful the small-multiple technique is at making easy comparisons across a complex dataset.

Cantabrigian Namesakes

The New Google Calendar Appointment Slots

Places and similar products have slowly been moving towards becoming a transaction environment. Last November Google rolled out, on a limited basis, a hotel booking feature. In December, Bing introduced a restaurant reservation system on their Place page equivalent. This spring when Google added rich snippet events to the Places page, they integrated the ability  to easily add those events to a user’s personal calendar.


Google Calendar Appointment Slots On Monday Google rolled out appointment slots for Calendars. This feature allows you to not only publicly make your appointment slots visible to the others to see but also allows other Google Calendar users to book a segment of your time. BusinessInsider pointed out that the feature will very likely be a big hit with students looking to schedule a meeting with a teacher.

But as reader @brazil_83 pointed out to me that is likely just the beginning. He noted that it “seems like Google [is] getting close to providing scheduling for more complex activ: spa, golf, restos – anything social”.

Clearly this appointment slot feature is a critical piece of infrastructure. When viewed in light of the Places hotel bookings and the event/G calendar integration features, this puts Google one fairly short step away from adding an appointment feature on your Places page for a whole raft of business related activities from massages to scheduling your dish washer repair.

Every time a consumer touches a Place page is an opportunity for Google to insert themselves in the local sales process. This new capability, when (if?) added to Places, is one that arguably could remove friction in the local buying process, increase Google’s supply of local (time) inventory information and provide a perfect nexus for additional revenue for Google.