"amazon" in Weblog

Not to be outdone by the likes of Google, A9 have launched their own maps site. Why would you use this one instead of Google? Well, check over on the right hand side… For several major cities they’ve got photos of BOTH SIDES of all the main roads! You can find out what the place you’re trying to find actually looks like…

Now I wonder what the photographer thought when he got that phone call.

“Hi, we’d like you to take photos of New York” “Which bit?” “All of it.”

With everything that’s going on with Google at the moment it’s worth revisiting EPIC: “It’s the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?” Now read The Google File System and Welcome to the Google Twilight Zone…

Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, who put together the EPIC movie, appear to have been pretty much bang on with their predictions. The idea of the Google Grid is facinating and entirely plausible… Could Google be the new Microsoft? Is Bill Gates worried?

If this is what I think it is, it’s pretty damned clever… The Amazon site in pure XML using XSLT and CSS for styling. It’s a demonstration of what web services can do and the power of XML.