Google Maps used to track Bushfires in Victoria

Google Australia engineers have created a Flash map to keep track of the deadly bushfires ravaging south-eastern Australia and help reduce the traffic burden to official sites coordinating emergency services.
The fires, which have tragically claimed more than 100 lives, are being tracked in real time with information provided by the state of Victoria's Country Fire Authority (CFA) via an RSS feed.
Read more at BuilderAU or check it out here

Google Earth Goes underwater!

Google has just released Version 5 of its popular Google Earth Software.

Probably the coolest development of the software is that you now have the ability to view and interact with 3D maps of the ocean floor. This data has been collected from a variety sources, however the largest contributor was the US Navy (so no doubt its pretty up to date!).

Google has also partnered with National Geographic,the BBC and Cousteau’s Ocean World which provides additional info such global fishing crisis to footage of shipwrecks. Marine life census data and scientific expeditions amongst other things (our client the Marine Teachers Ass of Queensland is going to go bananas over this!).

Search engines from the 90's

Do you remember the days when Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo were the sites to go to find information online? This is back in the days before Google, and I was mostly accessing the internet from School or at home using Dialup (we were on a $40 / month plan - and that got us 20 hours of internet per month! - great value back then! Also there was like two suppliers of Internet on the Gold Coast back then as well).

Take a trip thru time, and suss the gallery on Zdnet featuring screen grabs from the most popular search engines (suss Google's logo!) back then.