Google Earth CTO Michael Jones was the keynote speaker for UC Berkeley's GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Day conference and symposium. The presentation seemed perfect for the standing-room-only crowd, with a good mixture of academic name dropping, Hurricane Katrina rescue stories and general goofiness. Mr. Jones used much of the keynote as an opportunity to market the coolness factors of Google Earth, showing 3D fly-throughs and whimsical data representations. But there where also some very interesting, big picture, concepts relating to the varied applications for geospatial data and the ways people adopt new technological tools in general.

To illustrate the varied uses of geospatial data, Mr. Jones presented a set of disparate photos; William Shakespeare, a bank robber, a whale shark, and a herd of elephants. First he showed how a member of the community had submitted many of the locations mentioned in Shakespeare's plays. Next he showed how another member of the community had tagged the location of a prison where he had served time for a bank robbery. That tag had sparked thread where another member posted a surveillance camera photo from the actual robbery. For the whale shark, he showed live updated location data from a GPS unit attached to a giant fish as it migrated through the Pacific Ocean. He also showed aerial photos of elephants that were associated with specific locations in Africa, allowing the users to search for the animals and then zoom in from the satellite images to a detailed view of a herd (including the cute baby elephants). The transitions between datasets were very fluid, giving the feeling of spinning a globe or physically traveling from continent to continent. The connecting idea was that geographic information associations can providea new, visual context to countless types of data, not just the traditional sewers and road networks of big institutional GIS databases.

As a web developer, his secondary theme of technology adoption rang a bell for me. He noted that emerging tools and technologies are usually created for experts by experts. He sited an example of a software development group that was pushing the envelope further and further, adding new functionality to a product until it was eventually so complex that it alienated entry level users. Google sees an opportunity to foster entry level users through simple viewing and community authoring tools, giving them a path into a realm that has been dominated by very complex and specialized applications. Of course Google can also serve up highly targeted advertisements based on same the geographic data, coupled with the data they collect in Gmail, and Blogger accounts, and... you get the idea. A nerdy night out in Berkeley wouldn't be complete without a little bit of anti-establishment paranoia.