Check out Google Lat Long Blog for a good description, and some instructions, on how to employ the update of Street View with Google Maps.

Now you’ll find “Pegman” in color on top of the zoom slider when you are searching a place with Street View.  Just drag and drop him to the point on the map where you want to see what the street looks like.  To see a preview thumbnail, hold Pegman over a location for a second.  The direction you’re facing depends on which side of the street you drag to.  Of course you can move around to check out the environs.

You’ll also see a minimap in the corner that shows you a map of the surrounding area.  To see Street View and the map at the same time, click on the icon at the top left of the minimap.  The split screen view is especially handy for previewing turns along the way when you’re looking up driving directions.  Each step will be listed at the top of the Street View image.  In the street view portion, click on the icon at the top left to get a full screen view.

Street View’s layout has been revamped so you can look at the big picture, for instance, The Louvre in Paris, as shown in the image below.  Notice the green circle around the icon in Street View which is how you toggle to a full screen view and the red circle on the top left of the map that will toggle split or unsplit screens.  There is a YouTube video showing you the ins and outs.

Black Fridaydeals at Amazon have already started.  Stay out of the malls now — and after Thanksgiving — by shopping online.

Amazon.com is a favorite shopping place of mine.  The breadth of the selection is pretty amazing, and I always watch out for items with free shipping to boost savings.

My family and friends know to set up their wish lists to give me hints about just what gifts they would like for Christmas.  The famous after Thanksgiving sales — Black Friday — are now ready for an early start at Amazon.

Google launched two million photos from the 1750s to today as a start on a huge, 10 million item archive of newly digitized images from LIFE Magazine.  LIFE has said that more than 95 percent of its photo archive has never been publicly viewed or published in the magazine.

“This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google software engineer Paco Galanes wrote on the Official Google Blog.  LIFE was established as a magazine in 1883 and eventually ceased publication in 2006.

Along with displaying the images online, Google said they can be printed for free as long as they are not being used to make money.  Framed high resolution prints in various sizes are for sale online at the click of a button after you select the image you want.

Google offers this search tip:  add “source:life” to any Google image search to search only the LIFE photo archive.  View the LIFE gallery.

I first read yesterday that Google was gradually rolling out themes for Gmail, giving us the option to further customize what some of us see a lot of — our Gmail.

Themes didn’t show up in my Gmail account until this morning.  I have had fun playing around with them to see what I like best, at least for right now.  When I selected “mountains,” I was informed that the look would change according to my location and invited to enter it.

New Google toolbar and handy gadgets
If you haven’t downloaded the new Google toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox, you’re missing out on some handy new gadgets.

I was particularly interested in the Google Maps gadget which pops up when you click on it, allowing you to use it without leaving the site you are on.  Find businesses (and reviews) or get driving directions.

While you are at it, you may want to check out the toolbar gadget gallery.  [via Lat Long Blog]

Quick definition search
I saw this post awhile ago and was reminded that I ought to spend some time learning the ins and outs of Google search instead of just plugging in basic keywords that come to me.

The “define:” search command is an easy way to a dictionary function and it will likely give you several options.

In the Google search bar, enter define:[something] and try it out.    

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has announced the December 19th auction of more than 50,000 acres of oil and gas parcels alongside or within view of Arches National Park and two other red-rock national parks in Utah, according to the Seattle P-I.

The National Park Service’s top official in the state calls it “shocking and disturbing.”

The BLM can’t figure out what all the fuss is about.  BLM state director Selma Sierra was defiant, saying she saw nothing wrong with drilling near national parks.  “I don’t see it as something we are doing to undermine the Park Service.”

Conservation groups dispute that, saying never before has the bureau bunched drilling parcels on the fence lines of national parks.

“This is the fire sale, the Bush administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry,” said Stephen Bloch, a staff attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.  “These are the crown jewels of America’s lands that the BLM is offering to the highest bidder,” he said.

An examination of the parcels, superimposing low-resolution government graphics onto Google Earth maps, shows that in one case, drilling parcels bordering Arches National Park are 1.3 miles from Delicate Arch.

“If you’re standing at Delicate Arch, like thousands of people do every year, and you’re looking through the arch, you could see drill pads on the hillside behind it.  That’s how ridiculous this proposed lease sale is,” said Franklin Seal, a spokesman for the environmental group Wildland CPR.

In all, the BLM is moving to open 359,000 more acres in Utah to drilling.

The Center for Fire Research & Outreach (U Cal Berkeley) provides a Fire Information Engine Toolkit and California Active Fire Mapper online.

It shows active fires, and those within the last 3-7 days, when you select a city then click on the map for more detailed fire informaiton.

There are also useful links, such as to the Santa Barbara Tea Fire Map and up-to-the-minute news.

OCLC, the schools of Information at Syracuse and the University of Washington, and numerous libraries are exploring the possibility of building a search engine using the expertise of librarians from around the globe.  The idea is that when users enter a search term, results will be weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at major institutions, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus.

Called Reference Extract, it is envisioned as a web search engine, like Google, Yahoo and MSN, only with more credibility. A $100,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is supporting the planning proposal.

One of the proposal’s leaders is Michael B. Eisenberg, dean emeritus and professor at Washington’s information school, who has called for people to submit ideas on the project’s Web site.  “Google is everywhere, easy to use, and somewhat effective in offering useful results.  But, I can’t always trust the results,” he wrote.  “Is there a way to improve on that?”  The idea is to cull and promote recommendations from tens of thousands of librarians around the world.  The technical architecture that would power the search engine is as yet unknown.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) continues its suggestions for “how the new leadership in Congress and the White House can restore some of the civil liberties we’ve lost over the past eight years.”

We previously covered the first in the series which was on privacy rights and surveillance.  This post focuses on innovation, fair use and intellectual property.

The EFF believes that balance has been lost in the area of copyright.  Powerful entities trying to maximize their intellectual property rights “have run roughshod over the people’s fair use rights.”  In an age of user-generated content, this is particularly problematic.  They offer some suggestions:

• Repair the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) so that copyright holders do not get statutory damages for noncommercial violations, and more along this line.
• Reform the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), emphasizing its role to promote, rather than impede, innovation.
• Don’t let the content industry use our government resources to pressure universities and others to participate in their “intimidating” peer-to-peer dragnet operations.
• Show caution before regulating the use of technologies that limit consumer choice or consumer rights.

I have followed the development and introduction of the G1, the T-Mobile phone featuring the first Android OS.  I also visited my local T-Mobile store (I’m a customer) for an up-close look the day it was launched.

Some of the apps available for it have made me wonder about their usefulness — for instance, Barcode Scanner — so I thought this post was interesting.  Jeff Breidenbach, an engineer at Google Book Search, used the scanner on a new book he received and explains how it works.

If a scanned book is on Google Book Search, you’ll be able to search the full text right away.  Say you’re looking for a particular passage, or to find out if a book contains information on your topic of interest.

Breidenbach warns that there may be some hiccups with this new app, and not every book is on Google Book Search, but it potentially moves one another step along the information chain, and he believes, “the tool opens up new ways to experience printed works.”