A Google-Earth-view of Biblical events was presented at an art installation in Miami last week, showing the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the crucifixion of Jesus.
The project, God’s Eye View, was produced by Sydney-based creative team The Glue Society, commissioned by Eric Romano of Pulse Art, New York, for its Miami art fair.
The Sydney Morning Herald quotes Glue Society’s co-founder, Jonathan Kneebone, as saying God’s Eye View was not intended to be a theological statement. “Art has always depicted religious events and this is simply a new way to do it,” he said. “We’re playing with the whole idea that if you can capture something from a satellite it must exist.”
Kneebone described the four pictures as digital “jigsaw puzzles” made by piecing together real satellite images. The picture of the Red Sea, for example, uses photographs of Niagara Falls to create the impression of tonnes of foaming water. The Garden of Eden photograph uses images from Belgium.
“We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece we felt technology now allows events which may or may not have happened to be visualized and made to appear dramatically real. As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust.”
I’ve been wondering how to train search engine robots to stop by more regularly, and how to get them to look at the appropriate pages. I’ve managed to sort a few things out at Google Sitemaps. The site for webmasters sitemaps program is a two-way communication between webmasters and Google. We can give Google information about our sites so they can index them more effectively. And Google shows us how they see our sites and tells us about any trouble they’ve had crawling them.
There are three steps involved.
1. Visit Google Sitemaps, signing in with a Google account.
2. Add the URLs of the web sites.
3. Create an HTML document with your special code as the name - verifying that you own the site. Place it in the root directory.
4. Verify the site with Google.
5. Create a sitemap file, using protocol recognised by Google and other search engines. The XML file includes information on the URLs to be searched, with details on how often they are likely to be changed.
For my birthday this year I was given a copy of David Vise’s book, “The Google Story”. The book was published in November 2005, which makes it a reasonably up-to-date coverage of the rise of Google from its early days at Stanford through to its float on the stock exchange.
David Vise, who apparently doesn’t work for Google, takes us through a journey with Sergey Brin and Larry Page as they hang out together at Stanford, attend Burning Man Festival, and of course develop their capacity to download the whole of the internet on to their computers.
There are chapters on Adsense, the hiring of a CEO, partnership with Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and AOL, Google News, Google Translation and country-specific portals, Google Earth and Google Moon, Froogle, click fraud, competition with Microsoft and entry into the Chinese market.
The book ends with some consideration of Google’s effect on Microsoft. I note that MSN Search was quicker to cache Duncan’s TV Adland when I moved it to its own domain. However something like 85 to 90 percent of searches for pages at my sites are done through Google.
The book finishes with 23 Google Search Tips, a Google Labs Aptitude Test, and the Google Financial Scorecard for the years 1999 to 2004.
I’ve been wondering how to train search engine robots to stop by more regularly, and how to get them to look at the appropriate pages. I’ve managed to sort a few things out at Google Sitemaps. The site for webmasters sitemaps program is a two-way communication between webmasters and Google. We can give Google information about our sites so they can index them more effectively. And Google shows us how they see our sites and tells us about any trouble they’ve had crawling them.
