More Procrastination

Seeing the map of the Griffith park fire the L.A. Times prepared by annotating GoogleEarth images, I remembered that I did some follow-up (back in December) on Geoportail.fr and haven't gotten around to posting it. Earlier (August) I had read what some courageously anonymous WSJ editorial writer thought of French and European 'vanity projects', which included GeoPortail, an impertinent rival to GoogleEarth it would seem; I was angered, for several reasons.

first, really teed off post

calmer post

Meanwhile, Sochaux just scored and is 1-1 with Marseille with about 20 minutes to go.

I did screen caps of the best view I could get of "where I live" with each of them. Clearly the GeoPortail has some room for improvement:

• the left-hand column is too narrow, hardly more than half the Google column size. This gives the impression that the larger image is larger.
• the logo, too, is much too small, and only shows a flag with a national shape: anybody who can read might not get it.
  
• the left-hand column only has within-site navigation options, not a single proposition to visit a paid advertiser. Hopefully there will soon be a shop added so one can buy a t-shirt with one's map on it and much, much more!
  
• the houses and stuff are much bigger, arguably too big; you can practically tell the trees from the forest: if terrorists out to get me get control of the satellites with the lethal lasers, I would be in more trouble than with the GoogleEarth images.
  

Technorati Tags: Alsace, France, GeoPortail, Google, satellite images, Wall Street Journal, WSJ editorial

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