Google Street View Goes Live in Antarctica

Antarctica isn't exactly known for its streets, but that didn't stop Google from unveiling its Street View feature on the coldest continent on Thursday. After running into opposition in Germany and the Czech Republic over the controversial imaging service, Antarctica was a welcome change, Google employees tell the Guardian: There were no legal proceedings to deal with or privacy concerns from penguins. "This allows people to understand the contrast between New York's Times Square and being on the edge of a glacier looking at penguins," geospatial technologist Ed Parsons told the paper, describing how much the technology has changed since Street View was launched three years ago. Over the next 24 hours, Street View images will go live from Antarctica, Ireland, and Brazil, giving Google an on-the-ground presence on all seven continents.

Credits: Slate Magazine

Doodle 4 Google: 9-year-old's drawing hung on the biggest fridge of them all

Just days after its wildly successful Pac-Man logo, Google has changed its banner once again. Today, the company turns to budding artist Makenzie Melton, the 9-year-old winner of this year's Doodle 4 Google contest.

The annual competition collects thousands of student submissions and millions of votes from Google users. Poll results crowned Makenzie, a third grader from El Dorado Springs, Mo. Along with the honor of ruling Google's homepage for a day, Makenzie will receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a new computer, and $25,000 for her school to build a new computer lab.

Makenzie says that her Doodle 4 Google drawing, called "Rainforest Habitat,” aims to raise awareness that "the rainforest is in danger and it is not fair to the plants and animals. I love everything except spiders and snakes, but I would still save them.”

While the contest is open to students in kindergarten through grade 12, elementary schoolers have dominated the competition. Both of the previous Doodle 4 Google winners were in sixth grade.

Today's special logo shows again that Google is committed to increasingly frequent novelty banners. Before Pac-Man (which you can still play for free, by the way), there was the Tchaikovsky dancers, the Thumbelina flipbook, the Topeka April Fools' joke, and several others – all within a month of each other.

Credits: Chris Gaylord, Christian Science Monitor

Americans Spent 4,000,000 Hours Playing Google Pac-Man

The good news is that the gods of Google have seen fit to enshrine Friday's tribute to Pac-Man on its own site. Change your home page and you can spend the rest of your life clicking "Insert Coin" before you click "Search." The bad news is that the data nerds at RescueTime have already quantified exactly how guilty you should feel about all that Pac-Man. Tony Wright examined data from thousands of Web users and determined that the average person spent 36 seconds longer than usual on Google on Friday, the day the special logo launched. That means Google's millions of users spent 4,819,352 hours playing Pac-Man. Assuming that most of them were playing at work (which surely is a safe assumption), and they all were worth $25 an hour (which may not be a safe assumption), then $120,483,800 worth of work evaporated into the Googlesphere Friday. Wright says the "damage" would have been even worse if it had been more obvious that the logo was a fully-functioning game. "I'd wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it," he says. "Which the world should be thankful for." Kottke's Aaron Cohen begs to differ. "Holy crap," he said Friday. "I think this is why they made the Internet."

Credits: Slate Magazine