Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

If there was any doubt that Google”s new position in the mindset of America is “rich whipping boy”, that”s been clearly shown in the past few days of this “Google thinks Katrina never happened” crap. For those of you too caught up in the endless sea of lame April Fools” stories online, here”s the skinny - somebody noticed that the aerial imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps showed New Orleans before the failures of the federal levees during Hurricane Katrina. They also remembered that there was a time when Google Earth and Google Maps showed really revealing photos of the flooding brought on by the levee failures. Thus, in the logic of the masses, Google is involved in some kind of revisionist history.

As best as I can tell (thanks to Google News), this started with an AP story on March 29 headlined “Google Goes Back to Pre-Katrina Maps” that was nothing more than AP reporter Cain Burdeau noticing that aerial imagery in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast pre-dated the arrival of Katrina. That story was picked up in media outlets across the country and around the world. For the March 30 news cycle, a TV-version of the story added the phrase “Google recently replaced satellite imagery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina with pictures taken before the storm” without any kind of attribution of the “recently” statement.

On Friday, the frenzy had grown to the point that a Congressional subcommittee dragged Google CEO Eric Schmidt up to explain what one congressman called “airbrushing history”.

Yesterday, the company announced that it had pushed out new imagery of New Orleans and explained why - six months ago (way to pay attention, media) - the main aerial imagery of New Orleans changed to show pre-Katrina views. Was it dumb for Google to choose higher-resolution pre-Katrina images over what they had in place before that change? Yes. But this only demonstrates the company”s engineering mindset and lack of social skills, not an evil intent.

All of this shows two things - the not-so-hidden desire to beat up on Google and a complete lack of understanding of the online maps & imagery world.

Beating up on Google:

- Did anybody bother to notice that Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Local Live and Ask City all have pre-Katrina images? Yahoo Maps still has a bigger market share than Google and also has pre-Katrina images, so why weren”t they picked on? MapQuest, by the way, has post-Katrina images.

- Does nobody remember the extraordinary lengths Google developers and the Google Earth community went to in providing near-realtime imagery immediately after Katrina? Google Earth was to Katrina what CNN was to the first Gulf War - a unique and invaluable resource that found its highest purpose during a time of crisis. I remember being on the phone with my friend Dave while he was holed up in Houston; browsing through NOAA images via Google Earth trying to help him find out the fate of his life back home. For a city in exile, those early images so well-integrated into Google Earth and Google Maps were the only bits of information available about specifics on the ground. It”s shameful for the media and politicians to jump on this perceived slap by Google in the wake of that.

Not understanding the Maps & Imagery world:

- Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, you cannot carry your laptop outside, load Google Maps and see yourself in the front yard. Map and imagery databases are complex and huge elements that are in constant update mode. It”s just that the world is big, so it takes a while to get back to your neighborhood. Here in Atlanta, Google Maps knows Glenwood Park”s roads exist, but still shows a dirt pit in the imagery. Accurate? Only partly.

- Imagery is the wow factor of maps, not the product. Online maps are meant to be maps; the satellite imagery (and things like Microsoft”s BirdsEye imagery) are meant to be differentiators that draw users from the competition. Online mapping has become vastly more useful in the past few years, but imagery is still mostly just a bolt-on feature.

- The tools are there to get what you want from imagery. Google Earth has a slightly different mission than online maps. It is intended to meld together collections of imagery, location information, etc. from company developers and - more importantly - the GIS community. If you want detailed imagery of just about any place, it”s out there.

- You”re spoiled. Carry yourself back to 1997 and find a satellite or aerial image of your house. I”ll wait …
TerraServer started the revolution in online imagery only a decade ago, and now aerial imagery and relevant location content is inescapable. And by and large it”s free. Online mapping has evolved amazingly in just the past three years, and today we have multi-view mashups like zillow.com that are leveraging the power of mapping, imagery and data for the benefit of consumers (and companies like zillow). It”s easy to forget that not too long ago, this was your only choice for an online map:

So, please, everybody just lay off this Google “revisionist history” garbage.

And I guess I shouldn”t mention that Waveland, Mississippi doesn”t really look like this anymore.

I”m not going to say much about the ambulance-chasing talking hairdo exploiting New Orleans today for his own political gain - except this: you want a photo op of you “helping” New Orleans? There are bigger things to tackle than spreading dirt for a patio, shithead. Put on some coveralls and a mask and get inside one of the hundreds (thousands?) of houses still sitting ruined and molding 16 months after Katrina. But that would be hard to get pictures of, wouldn”t it? No, I”m ticked this morning about something Sen. Hairdo”s online adviser (or whatever he”s doing) wrote upon arriving in New Orleans last night.

Robert Scoble was - not surprisingly - shocked at what he saw when he got to town last night. He”s right - something is indeed very different in New Orleans.

But here”s the line that really disturbed me:

this is our favorite city

Your favorite city? And apparently you haven”t been back since Katrina? But still you say it”s your favorite city? Interesting.

I don”t want to pick on Scoble. It could very well be that he”s been to the city several times since Katrina (but just doesn”t write about it), has donated considerable money to relief efforts and orders a case of Hubig”s Pies every Monday morning to get a little cash flowing in the city.

I”d just like that quote and apparent disconnect between feelings toward New Orleans and actions to help the city survive to serve as a reminder. If you love New Orleans; if New Orleans is your “favorite city”; if you give a damn about New Orleans surviving, then take some action. Visit the city and help your favorite restaurant stay in business.

Mike Rowe didn”t have a hard time finding some really vile work in this week”s episode of Dirty Jobs, because he spent the whole show in New Orleans. He rode with the rodent and mosquito abatement crews, highlighting the issue of non-human life that”s thriving in a very disturbing way. Most interesting was how they combat the problem of swimming pools at destroyed houses that are now huge mosquito breeding grounds - they capture mosquito-larvae-eating fish in canals and transfer them to the swimming pools.

But half of the show was spent with a demolition crew at a house in St. Bernard Parish that apparently hadn”t been touched since Katrina (the show was shot in October of this year). Mike did a decent - but not great - job of driving home the magnitude of the situation down there and generally kept a respectful tone as he helped throw all of this family”s ruined possessions out on the curb before gutting the house.

And since the house hadn”t been touched since the flood, the kitchen was full of rotting, molding food, high-living mice and hundreds of the biggest roaches I”ve ever seen. They had to throw out everything in the kitchen - apparently the refrigerator rot gets less foul over time - before ripping out the cabinets and walls, so Mike rooted through the roach-filled cabinets to toss out the dry goods.

In a great moment, he paused while chucking one particular item:

If you don”t know what that is, I”m not going to tell you. A real shame. I like to think that Mike paused in appreciation for the little guy”s service and in recognition of the loss.

Thanks to Dirty Jobs for giving a little attention to the fading tale of New Orleans” struggle.

One year ago this morning, I was at work trying to get information on Hurricane Katrina as the storm came ashore. I knew the Mississippi coast - and particularly Waveland and Bay Saint Louis - were getting hammered, but there was little real-time information coming out.

Then the wife sent me a link over AIM. It looked like this:

It was a graph of wave heights on the pier in Waveland that morning. I didn”t know exactly what it meant, but the tide spiking so hard and readings ending at 4 a.m. sent a clear signal. It was bad.

No sane person could have imagined just how bad things would get, though.

For somebody who lives 450 miles away from The Katrina Zone, the storm has played a big part in my last 365 days. It”s natural, of course, since I grew up in Louisiana and have good friends and family in New Orleans and coastal Mississippi. Looking back now, a bunch of moments stick out in my mind:

- My parents getting diverted to Atlanta on their way back from Las Vegas - and then almost running out of gas trying to drive a rental car back home.

- The sickening first days when people I knew and relatives of friends weren”t accounted for.

- Using the then little-known Google Earth to help friends in New Orleans scout the flood.

- Having to be in Tennessee instead of Louisiana for Labor Day, and spending every spare moment in front of the TV.

- The shrimp boat at I-10, Blackhawks in Baton Rouge and other encounters on my first trip back in early September.

- Realizing how much it helps to just be there.

- Learning how bad an MRE can be.

- Being unequipped to handle what we saw when we finally made it back to Waveland and New Orleans.

- Driving an old pickup from Uptown to Lakeview with few traffic lights working and the wife trying to follow me.

- Watching a Saints game at Tiger Stadium.

- The mix of joy and sorrow at Jazz Fest.

- Regretting never introducing the wife to Hubig”s pies before Katrina and being real happy when I was finally able to get her one (or 5) in May.

- Becoming friends with a Katrina-evacuee couple (not native New Orleanians) who”ve become neighbors of ours and really liking that they feel at home in East Atlanta.

There are other things, of course, that are more personal to me or others that I haven”t touched on much at the Wisdom during the last year. But suffice it to say it”s been a long year for some people; and normal is still a ways off.

And I have a lot of concerns about the future of New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. But that”s for another time.

I”ll close out year one with what I see as a hopeful picture taken in Waveland after Katrina:

I”m just 200 pages into Douglas Brinkley”s The Great Deluge, but it”s already clear this is essential reading for anyone who wants to really understand what happened in New Orleans and Mississippi before, during and after Katrina.