Bing Maps: Turkey and Travel

What do pistachios, Turkey, and travel have in common? In a recent post on the New York Times’ Frugal Traveler blog, we learn that a city called Gaziantep located in southeastern Turkey is the self-proclaimed pistachio capital, and apparently a trip there is lovely and quite affordable.

While the blog itself is a good read, the New York Times needed an easy way for readers to visually follow the blogger on his 10-week Mediterranean adventure this summer. So they turned to Bing Maps.

Using Bing Maps developer tools, the New York Times created a mapping feature that shows the blogger’s current location, where he had been, and where he was going. Readers just click to navigate between locations, easily moving between blog posts and traveling the Mediterranean vicariously through the Frugal Traveler.

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If you’re interested in learning more about dev APIs and what you can do with them, visit the Bing Maps site.

Arden on Impossible People

 

“I only want people around me who can do the impossible.”

–Elizabeth Arden (1878–1966)

Canadian businesswoman, style mogul

What if…

John and Abigail Adams had been more concerned with themselves and work/life balance than creating a democracy?

What if… Abraham Lincoln had quit trying after having a business go under and losing his first local legislative race (and then 3 congressional races and 2 senatorial races)?

What if… Martin Luther King didn’t have a dream and played it safe (and didn’t travel over 6 million miles giving more than 2500 speeches). What if he thought he was too young to have an impact (he did everything he did in a life of only 39 years)?

What if… Gandhi, Teresa, Roosevelt, Ford, Disney, Walton, Gates, Winfrey, Jobs, Stewart, and Ash hadn’t stepped up and worked hard. (What if the thousands of people who supported them hadn’t?) What if your police, military, firefighters didn’t?

What if… No one pushed it, risked it, and pushed it again (and again)?

Be obligated to your world (your customers, your people).

An explosion at French nuclear plant

There was an explosion at a French nuclear plant that took the life of one worker and injured a few others. Fortunately, no leak has been reported and things seem to be under control.

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However, a quick click of the historical imagery button reveals the full plant in high resolution, dated back to 2002.

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The plant first went operational in 1956, and while things may have changed slightly in the last 9 years, the aerial imagery from 2002 seems to closely resemble the shots being shown on sites like Yahoo news.

Here are a few thoughts/ideas:

1 — Google itself doesn’t blur imagery; only their providers do. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that Google would ever go back and blur historical imagery if it was provided to them in an un-blurred state at some point. Another potential complication is that the most recent imagery was provided by GeoEye, while the older (clear) imagery was provided by DigitalGlobe.

2 — Perhaps some construction at the site has been under way and things are different now than they were in 2002, or perhaps they are simply blurring the plant going forward to hide any changes that take place in the future.

3 — The imagery in Bing Maps is only slightly blurred; it’s still easy to see where the various buildings are located, though Bing doesn’t provide a precise date on their imagery.