That’s no movie monster–that’s an artist’s impression of a real pliosaur. Make it bigger.

Yesterday, we swam with a great white shark. Today, we’ve discovered an even bigger marine predator–one so big and so bad it’s being called the “T-rex of the sea,” or, simply, “The Monster.” Unlike great white sharks, monsters like this one–called pliosaurs–died out millions of years ago. But that doesn’t make them any less amazing.

Measure the Monster

Norwegian scientists unearthed The Monster’s skeleton last year, on a remote archipelago not far from the North Pole. This week, they announced that the monstrous fossil represents the largest pliosaur ever discovered–and one of the largest known of all marine reptiles, too.

How big was the beast? Think of it this way. To pull its tear-shaped, 50-foot (15-meter) body through the water, it used 10-foot (3-meter) flippers. And, with a head 6.5 feet (2 meters) long and bone-crushing teeth the size of cucumbers, The Monster was big enough to swallow you whole.

The Monster was no gentle giant, either. Experts estimate that its jaws packed enough punch to bite a small car in half. And it likely lunched on dolphin-like ichthyosaurs that were 10 feet long, weighed 500 pounds (225 kg) or more, and sported sharp teeth of their own. Simply put, next to The Monster, a great white would have been shark bait.

Meet the Monster’s Family

Scientists say pliosaurs like The Monster were top marine predators during the Jurassic Period, which lasted from around 200 million to around 145 million years ago. Technically, they weren’t dinosaurs, the terrestrial titans of the time. Rather, pliosaurs were part of the large family of carnivorous aquatic reptiles known as plesiosaurs.

Never heard of plesiosaurs? Surely you’ve heard of their legendary descendent “Nessie,” the Loch Ness monster. Typically, plesiosaurs had long, highly flexible necks and mouths filled with very sharp teeth.

Pliosaurs like The Monster had shorter, stouter necks and may have used their powerful flippers to launch surprise attacks on unsuspecting prey. In fact, experts say that pliosaurs may have sometimes eaten their long-necked plesiosaur cousins. Nessie wouldn’t stand a chance.

That’s no movie robot– that’s a real great white shark

An Austrian man died this week after being bitten by a shark not far from the Bahamas–in waters that had been baited to make it more likely that he and other divers would come face to face with sharks.

The incident launched a worldwide debate among divers, conservationists, underwater photographers, and other shark enthusiasts about whether such “uncaged” dives with sharks should be allowed. While they debated the pros and cons of close encounters with ocean predators, we decided to learn more about the scariest shark of them all: the great white.

Feel the Fear

Known to scientists as Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark is one of the most feared predators on Earth. Spanning up to 20 feet (6 meters) and weighing up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg), it is built to kill.

It primarily likes seals, sea lions, turtles, smaller sharks, and other fine-flavored denizens of the deep. If you’re an animal on that list and a great white gets a whiff of your succulent aroma, you’re in a sea of trouble.

A Nose for Trouble

Great whites have a highly acute sense of smell. Their nostrils, called nares, aren’t used for breathing–that’s what gills are for. Instead, white sharks use their nares to sniff the water, picking up scents at a distance of a quarter-mile (0.4 km) or more, and then tracking them to their source.

A big part of every great white’s brain is dedicated to sniffing. If you’re a prey animal and you’re bleeding, don’t bother looking for a Band-Aid. A great white can smell extremely small amounts of blood in the water from a long way off–and it figures wounded prey is easy prey.

An Eye for the Fishies

The great white’s eyesight is also excellent for hunting. Like cats, great whites come equipped with a tapetum lucidum (literally, “bright carpet”), a special reflective layer behind the retina that magnifies light and enables the shark to hunt in the dark. This adaptation makes shark eyes several times more light-sensitive than human ones.

Great whites even have extra shark-senses to help them zero in on dinner. Their snouts are dotted with small pits, called ampullae of Lorenzini, that detect the electrical fields of fish and other creatures. And, running in a “lateral line” down each side of their bodies are motion sensors. Great whites can still sense what they can’t see.

The Better to Eat You With, My Dear

Still, the great white’s real weapon of bass destruction is a terrifying set of teeth, which can grow to a length of three inches (8 cm). Shaped like triangular, serrated blades, they’re arranged in six rows of around 26 teeth each, though these numbers can vary from specimen to specimen. A great white sheds and regrows its teeth throughout its life, ensuring a fresh and healthy supply for every feeding frenzy.

A great white’s bite packs tremendous power, and in the case of larger and potentially dangerous prey, it typically takes one bite, retreats, and waits for the animal to bleed to death before settling down to dinner. They’re fearsome predators, no doubt. But they’re more into ambush attacks than epic battles between creatures at sea.

Scary as they are, we probably have less to fear from great whites than they have to fear from us. They’re now protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Meanwhile, shark attacks on humans are rare. Statistics say you’re more likely to get zapped by lightning–or killed by a deer crashing into your car–than you are to be mercilessly hunted by a shark.

Judah Ben-Hur knew which sport was super

Tens of millions of viewers tuned in last night to watch the Super Bowl–the biggest “big game” on America’s sports calendar. Amid all the bone-crushing competition and superfluous spectacle, we couldn’t help but think about the most brutal and popular game in ancient Rome.

If you’re thinking gladiatorial contests, we have a surprise for you. Yes, the gladiators were popular, but the real action was down the road–in the Circus Maximus. That’s right. The Romans’ biggest “big game” was chariot racing.

ast Times at the CircusRoman chariots raced on tracks called “circuses” (because of their oval shape). The greatest of these, the Circus Maximus, started out simply as a flat space between two hills on which spectators sat. Eventually, it was ringed with bleachers–first of wood, then of stone. Admission was free, and there were seats for as many as 250,000 people. By comparison, the Colosseum sat no more than 50,000.

Most races featured quadriga teams–four horses yoked to each chariot. Up to twelve chariots per race took off from an elaborate starting gate, then sped along a sandy track. The chariots were lightly constructed of wood and, with four horses pulling together, they moved like lightning. But there were seven laps in a race (totaling three or four miles), and the corners were tight, so drivers had to rein their teams just right if they hoped to win–or even live to race another day.

Death Before Defeat

High-ranking Romans weren’t allowed to race in the Circus, so drivers tended to be low born–most were former slaves. With a cash purse riding on every contest, chariot racing was a way for talented men to make a lot of money and climb the social ladder.

Chasing wealth and glory, drivers often threw caution to the horse-sped wind. They wore helmets and wrapped leather around their chests for safety. But they also tied the reins around their waists to free their hands, and that could spell trouble. If a chariot capsized and a driver found himself dragged behind his team, his only chance was to cut the reins with a special curved dagger he wore for that purpose.

With so many teams taking tight turns at high speeds, it wasn’t unusual to see a driver get hurt. The Roman poet Martial wrote a verse in honor of the charioteer Scorpus, who won more than 2,000 races. His career ended abruptly when he took a turn too fast, flipped his chariot, and died.

Curse You, Ben-Hur!

Now, what could make chariot racing even more thrilling? Try team rivalries. Every chariot driver in the Circus Maximus belonged to one of four stables, known by their colors: red, green, white, and blue. Each stable had a star driver, and his teammates worked hard to make sure he won.

Fans identified strongly with favorite teams, and did what they could to cheer its star to victory (or heckle a hated rival to defeat). Archaeologists have even found ancient curse tablets in which fans tried to sabotage their favorite team’s rivals by means of the dark arts.

With so much passion invested in the sport, it’s no wonder that politicians found a way to exploit it. The famous phrase “bread and circuses” refers to the Roman method of distracting disaffected folk with free food and spectacular races at public expense. Better to pay for racing than put down revolt.

Correction Appended

Even as stocks ended five days of losses with a surprising recovery on Wednesday, officials began moving to defuse another potential time bomb in the markets: the weakened condition of two large insurance companies that have guaranteed buyers against losses on more than $1 trillion of bonds.

Regulators fear a possible chain of events in which the troubled bond insurers, MBIA and Ambac, might be unable to keep their promise to pay investors if borrowers default on their debt.

That could leave the buyers of the bonds — including many banks and pension funds — on the hook for untold billions of dollars in losses, shaking confidence in the financial system.

To avoid a possible crisis, insurance regulators met with representatives of about a dozen banks on Wednesday to discuss ways to shore up the insurers by injecting fresh capital, much as Wall Street firms have turned to outside investors recently after suffering steep losses related to subprime mortgages.

While it is unclear what steps, if any, the banks and regulators may ultimately take, the talks focused on raising as much as $15 billion for the companies, according to several people briefed on the discussion who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.

The notion that the failure of even one big bond insurer might touch off a chain reaction of losses across the financial world has unnerved Wall Street and Washington. It was a factor in the Federal Reserve’s decision on Tuesday to calm investors by reducing interest rates by three-quarters of a point, to 3.5 percent.

News of Wednesday’s meeting helped rally stocks, which had been down as much as 3 percent but ended up about 2 percent. Shares of MBIA jumped by nearly a third and Ambac jumped 72 percent, although they both remain far below their levels before the extent of the mortgage debacle became known.

Traditionally, bond insurance has been a low-risk business. State and municipal bonds rarely defaulted, so the insurers paid out few claims for such debt. But in recent years the bond insurers increasingly have guaranteed debt related to subprime mortgages, a business that they thought was safe but has turned out to be risky.

Now, as many subprime borrowers are defaulting, insurers could be obligated to cover some of the losses on securities backed by these loans.

Eric R. Dinallo, the New York insurance superintendent who regulates MBIA, called Wall Street executives on Tuesday to set up the meeting at his office in Lower Manhattan. He led the session on Wednesday and suggested that the group move in as little as 48 hours to get a deal done ahead of any downgrading of the bond guarantors by credit ratings firms.

According to two people, Mr. Dinallo said he would talk with the bankers one on one and reconvene the group — which included executives from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch — on Thursday or Friday. Neither federal officials nor executives of the two insurers attended the meeting.

“Regulators are furiously trying to come up with a plan,” said Rob Haines, an analyst at CreditSights, a research firm, who was not at the meeting.

Mr. Dinallo could face resistance from banks that do not have significant exposure to the guarantors and thus have less incentive to put up money. It is also unclear how executives and shareholders of the companies would react to the plan and the prospect of ceding control.

Sean Dilweg, the commissioner of insurance in Wisconsin, which regulates Ambac, sat in on the meeting but said he would be working with Ambac directly. Mr. Dilweg said he met separately on Tuesday with executives at Ambac, which is based in New York but chartered in Wisconsin.

“Eric is looking at the overall issue, but I am pretty confident that we will work through Ambac’s specific issues,” Mr. Dilweg said in a telephone interview. “They are a stable and well-capitalized company but they have some choices to make.”

Other options open to the banks include providing lines of credit and other backup financing to the guarantors. A chief goal of any rescue would be to help the companies regain or keep triple-A credit ratings, which are seen as vital to their business.

Late last year, Mr. Dinallo encouraged Berkshire Hathaway, the company controlled by Warren E. Buffett, to enter the bond insurance business. At the time, Mr. Buffett said he did not want to invest in existing guarantors because of their financial problems, and he started his own firm instead.

Since then, the troubles have worsened. Last week, Fitch Ratings downgraded Ambac’s credit ratings to double-A, from triple-A. MBIA still has a triple-A rating from the three agencies; the others are Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service.

While $15 billion might seem like a large amount of money for banks to commit to bond guarantors at a time when many investors have lost faith in them, Mr. Haines said it would be smaller than the billions the banks might have to write down if the companies lost their top ratings or incurred major losses.

“It’s a calculated kind of risk,” he said.

A spokesman for Ambac did not return calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman for MBIA declined to comment.

Analysts say it is unclear how much money would be needed to capitalize the companies adequately. Ratings agencies have changed their requirements several times already as they update their assumptions of defaults and losses on mortgage securities.

“What is needed to do the job is to solidify the market perception of a triple-A rating,” said Sean Egan, founder of Egan-Jones Ratings, a firm that says the companies may need to raise as much as $30 billion.

A recent effort by some banks to help a smaller bond insurer, ACA Capital, has not gone smoothly. The banks have twice agreed to give the company, which was downgraded to triple-C from single-A, more time to come up with an acceptable plan.

State regulators are under pressure to help solve a problem that many critics say could have been avoided with closer supervision. The insurers’ problems are also spilling over into the municipal bond market, making it harder for cities, counties and states to raise money for projects.

On Wednesday, for instance, some short-term insured municipal bonds, which typically trade at a premium to other bonds, were trading at a discount of as much as 1.5 percentage points to similar uninsured bonds, said Michael S. Downing, an account manager at Thomson Financial.

The companies have defended their assumptions. They also note that losses on the bonds that they insure would have to rise substantially before they would have to pay claims, and even then they would make interest and principal payments over the life of the bond, not all at once.

MBIA has estimated that in the worst case, which it described as a one in 10,000 event, it expects to incur losses of $10 billion, a fraction of the $673 billion it has insured.

Still, losses of that magnitude could strain the company’s finances, and the difficulties continue to mount. On Wednesday, Moody’s said it was considering downgrading a company, Channel Re, that reinsures more than $40 billion of insurance contracts written by MBIA. If the reinsurer is downgraded, MBIA, which owns more than 17 percent of Channel, would have to acknowledge fresh losses.

“If you are a bond insurer or bank you can never really eliminate the risk that you originated in entirety, unless you sell it,” said Edward J. Grebeck, chief executive of Tempus Advisors.

What would Ben Franklin think?

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Friends, America’s Federal Communications Commission voted on Tuesday to let media companies own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the nation’s 20 largest media markets. The controversial decision reverses a longstanding ban on such cross-media conglomeration.

Opponents of the change say the old rule helped prevent major media companies from becoming too dominant. Supporters say the new rule simply recognizes a changing media landscape, in which newspapers are struggling to find readers and more folks find the information they need online.

Either way, we say it’s a good time to look back at American media’s roots–to a time when local voices like Ben Franklin’s dominated. After all, before he messed around with lightning or charmed French royalty, old Ben was a newspaperman.

An Ink-Stained Wretch

Back then, printers did it all–interviewing recently arrived ship captains for out-of-town news, writing articles, plagiarizing stories from other newspapers, selling ads, printing the pages, and distributing the final product. In fact, most colonial newspapers sprang from small printshops that employed just the owner and his teenage apprentice.

Ben Franklin started in the printing trade as an apprentice to his older brother, James, who ran a small printshop in Boston. Working there exposed the young Franklin to different kinds of writing and gave him a chance to borrow books on the sly from booksellers’ apprentices.

In those days, printers had to be smart and strong. Composing the pages was a mental feat–type was set letter by letter, using little blocks of metal, and for the page to appear correctly when printed, every line had to be composed in reverse. (Many printers were as adept at reading backward as forward.) After the pages were made, the printer personally pulled the lever on the heavy wooden press to stamp the image–one page at a time. No wonder few colonial newspapers had a press run of more than 300.

The Life and Times of Silence Dogood

James Franklin wanted his publication, the New-England Courant, to be more than the usual collection of 6-month-old news that appeared in other colonial newspapers. So he solicited articles. In 1722, 14 letters appeared in the New-England Courant signed by “Silence Dogood.” The middle-aged widow had a lot to say about the clergy, fashion, and political matters, and people loved it–even if they didn’t know who the Widow Dogood really was.

Using a pen name was common at the time, so everyone knew “Dogood” wasn’t her real name. But no one knew that 16-year-old Ben had actually written the letters, sliding them under the printshop’s door at night.

A year after the Silence Dogood letters were published, Ben ran away from his brother’s employ. (Things got rough for James after he was thrown in jail for suggesting the local authorities were in cahoots with pirates.) Still in his teens, Ben apprenticed with a Philadelphia printer before sailing for London and working there for two years. By 1729, he was back in Philadelphia and publishing his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette.

All the News Ben Could Print

The Gazette was like most newspapers of its day–no headlines, few illustrations, and it ran only four pages. What set it apart was Franklin’s lively version of local news. He filled the columns with anecdotes like this one: “And sometime last Week, we are informed, that one Piles a Fidler, with his Wife, were overset in a Canoo near Newtown Creek. The good Man, ’tis said, prudently secur’d his Fiddle, and let his Wife go to the Bottom.” The Pennsylvania Gazette became one of the most successful newspapers of its time.

Colonial newspapers had no separate editorial pages, but they were packed with opinions. Just as he had done in his Silence Dogood days, Franklin often wrote an article in the voice of a fictional citizen. In 1735, he printed a letter purportedly written by an elderly gentleman, who encouraged his fellow Philadelphians to establish a volunteer fire department. The imaginary old man described leaping out the window of a burning house. By the end of the year, the Union Fire Company of Philadelphia had formed.

“Poor Richard” Makes Ben Wealthy

Franklin’s most successful editorial alter ego was “Poor Richard” Saunders, the pen name Franklin used for the 25 years he published Poor Richard’s Almanack. In the colonies, practically every printer published an annual almanac. These thick pamphlets, showing the phases of the moon and predicting the weather, were moneymakers because most literate households purchased one every year.

In 1732, Franklin threw together a 24-page publication with a first-person preface signed by Richard Saunders. The “author,” a destitute stargazer whose shrewish wife threatened to burn all his books and astronomy instruments if he didn’t “make some profitable use of them,” admitted the reason he wrote the almanac was to make a little money and get her off his back.

From 1732 to 1757, Poor Richard’s grew in popularity as readers found more than the usual astronomical charts and tidal tables. Tucked into this almanac were proverbs such as “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Franklin said he saw the almanac as a way to educate folks who might not buy any other books and so “filled all the little spaces that occurred between the Remarkable Days in the Calendar, with Proverbial Sentences, chiefly such as inculcated Industry and Frugality.”

Some years Franklin sold 10,000 copies. Combined with good investments and lucrative printing contracts, the profits from the almanac allowed him to retire from printing at the ripe old age of 42. Of course, Franklin’s “retirement” was more active than many a person’s working life. And though he was hailed as a scientist, diplomat, patriot, and philosopher, at the end of his days, Franklin was still proud of his printshop roots. When he wrote his will at the age of 82, he began: “I, Benjamin Franklin, printer, . . . “

Justice Department Says No To Net Neutrality

Posted: 07 Sep 2007 06:20 PM CDT

The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to “Net neutrality,” the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.

Several phone and cable companies, such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., have previously said they want the option to charge some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than others.

From The Economist print edition

As the internet becomes intertwined with the real world, the resulting “geoweb” has many uses

“EARTH materialises, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he’s looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore.”

That vision from Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, a science-fiction novel published in 1992, aptly describes Google Earth, a computer program that lets users fly over a detailed photographic map of the world. Other information, such as roads, borders and the locations of coffee shops can be draped on to the view, which can be panned, rotated, tilted and zoomed with almost seamless continuity. First-time users often report an exhilarating revelatory pang as they realise what the software can do. As the globe spins and switches from one viewpoint to another, it can even induce vertigo.

Google’s virtual globe incorporates elevation data that describe surface features such as mountains and valleys. Other data is then overlaid on it, notably a patchwork of satellite imagery and aerial photography licensed from several public and private providers. The entire planet is covered, with around one-third of all land depicted in such detail that individual trees and cars, and the homes of 3 billion people, can be seen. All this has long been imaginable but has become possible only recently, thanks to high-resolution commercial satellite imaging, broadband links and cheap, powerful computers.

Keyhole, an American firm, released the first commercial “geobrowser” in 2001. Google bought Keyhole in 2004 and launched Google Earth in 2005. Its basic, free version has since been downloaded over 250m times, says Michael Jones, one of Keyhole’s founders and now Google Earth’s chief technologist.

In 2004 America’s space agency, NASA, released another geobrowser, called World Wind. More than 20m copies are in use. But Google’s main geobrowsing rival is Microsoft. Both Encarta, Microsoft’s encyclopedia, and TerraServer, a database demonstration project, had geobrowser-like features in the 1990s. At the end of 2005 Microsoft bought GeoTango, which contributed to the development of Live Search Maps, a web-based geobrowser that uses data from Virtual Earth, Microsoft’s digital model of the planet. (Google also provides a web-based geobrowser via Google Maps.)

An overlay shows desroyed villages in Darfur; sunbakers on Sydney’s Bondi Beach; the city of Berlin, with detailed 3-D buildings

Vincent Tao, GeoTango’s founder and now director of Virtual Earth for Microsoft, allows that Microsoft has spent at the “couple of hundreds of millions of dollars level” on Virtual Earth. Most of that has been spent on the acquisition of imagery, which now totals 14 petabytes on 900 servers. (One petabyte is 1m gigabytes.) The company is also adding detail in the form of textured three-dimensional models of cities devised from aerial photographs; ten cities are added each month.

For its part, Google is relying on “crowdsourcing”—enlisting its users to build and contribute images, 3-D models of buildings and other data to enrich its digital planet. So far 850,000 users have contributed millions of annotations and more than 1m images, vetting one another’s contributions. Wikipedia, which uses a similar system, is itself available through Google Earth. Users can read Wikipedia articles placed on the globe using “geotags”—spatial co-ordinates encoded into each entry. Other sites including Flickr, the leading photo-sharing site, and Google’s YouTube, also support geotags.

These virtual globes are being put to an unexpected range of uses. Google Earth was used to co-ordinate relief efforts in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Tax inspectors in Buenos Aires are using it to see whether people are correctly reporting the size of their properties. An Italian programmer who was using the software noticed odd markings on the ground near his home town which turned out to be a previously unknown Roman villa. Roofers, landscape gardeners and solar-panel installers use the virtual maps to scout for potential customers. Rebecca Moore, a member of the Google Earth team, used the software to galvanise her neighbourhood in the Santa Cruz mountains in opposition to a nearby logging project. And the Amazon Conservation Team, an American charity, equipped 26 indigenous tribes in the Amazon with hand-held global positioning system units and computers running Google Earth, to enable them to assert their legal sovereignty in the face of threats from loggers and miners.

“It’s turning into a map of historical significance,” says John Hanke, head of Google’s Earth and Maps division, and another of Keyhole’s founders. “It is going to be a map of the world that is more detailed than any map that’s ever been created.” He may be understating the technology’s importance.

The world-wired web

Geobrowsers are a stunningly effective means of visualising the planet. But they are just one part of a broader endeavour, the construction of a “geoweb” that is still in its infancy, much as the world wide web was in the mid-1990s. The web did away with many geographical constraints, enabling people with common interests to communicate, regardless of location. Yet placelessness jettisons some of the most useful features of information, which are now attracting new attention.

At present the most feverish excitement surrounds the combination of virtual maps with other sources of data in “mash-ups”. One of the earliest examples, housingmaps.com, created in 2005, combines San Francisco apartment listings from Craigslist.org with Google Maps. Mash-ups have since become commonplace—Google says its maps are used in more than 4m of them. In April the company added features to Google Maps to make it easier to create mash-ups. Microsoft is at work on a similar tool. Another site, platial.com, provides free mash-up tools for bloggers, spawning a new genre in self-absorption: autobiogeography.

The geoweb has obvious appeal to those in the property business. Zillow.com mashes Microsoft’s Virtual Earth with other data to create maps of home prices in America. But property is just the start. At gasbuddy.com, visitors can map local petrol prices to plan fill-ups. ExploreOurPla.net brings together thousands of sources of images and data to let users investigate climate change.

House prices overlaid on a satellite map at Zillow.com; San Francisco, seen on Google’s Street View; a GIS view of an air-force base

These examples illustrate the emerging architecture of the geoweb: data, such as information on traffic jams or seismic tremors, is hosted separately from the images and models of the geobrowser, which assembles, combines and displays the information in new ways. GeoCommons.com hosts data, from crime rates to melanoma statistics, that can be combined to create colour-coded “heat maps” of intangibles such as “hipness”. Visitors to Heywhatsthat.com can generate a diagram of the view from any high spot to see the names of visible mountain peaks.

Here the neogeographers, as mash-up enthusiasts are known, have crossed into the terrain of “geographic information systems” (GIS), the fancy software tools that are used by governments and companies to analyse spatial data. Geobrowsers are still quite primitive by comparison, but are much easier to use. For its part GIS deals with critical infrastructure, so its data tend to be of impeccable quality. Jack Dangermond, the founder of ESRI, a private firm that dominates the GIS market, says interest stimulated by the geoweb has helped to boost business by 20% this year. Ron Lake of Galdos Systems, a firm that specialises in integrating civic geodata, says geobrowsers have led to a push for better public access to such data.

When the analytical insights and data quality of GIS are combined with the geoweb’s visualisation and networking prowess, startling efficiencies emerge. Last year Waterstone, a consultancy, assembled the geodata for 13 American air-force bases and wrapped them up in a modified version of NASA’s World Wind geobrowser. This makes it possible to walk through a 3-D model of each base and call up multiple layers of data. A project manager can view live video from a construction site and identify the contractors and their vehicles. A planner can assess a proposed building’s effect on runway visibility. And an environmental engineer, while viewing a plume of contaminated groundwater, can delve into 45 years’ worth of documents associated with the site. Carla Johnson, Waterstone’s boss, says the project cost less than $1m and is expected to save the air force around $5m a year through faster decision-making.

Smile, you’re on Google Earth

Like any technology, the geoweb has both good and bad uses. When geobrowsers first introduced easy access to satellite imagery, something that had previously only been available to intelligence agencies, many observers worried that terrorists might use such images to plan attacks. Google Earth seems to have been used in this way by Iraqi insurgents planning attacks on a British base in the city of Basra, for example, in which individual buildings and vehicles can be clearly seen. After this came to light in January, the images of the area in question were replaced with images from 2002, predating the construction of the camp.

This summer a member of the Assembly of the State of New York called on Google to obscure imagery after the geobrowser was used by plotters in a foiled airport attack. Yet Mr Jones says Google has been formally contacted by governments in this regard only three times (including by India and by an unspecified European country), and that in each case the issue was resolved without making changes to the imagery in Google Earth.

Although some buildings or areas are blurred for security reasons, Google says this is done by the firms from which it licenses the imagery. Microsoft says it blurs photos in response to “legitimate government and agency requests”. But the images are typically between six months and three years old, which limits their tactical usefulness; and satellite and aerial images are available from many other sources, and have been for some time. So in some respects, geobrowsers have not made possible anything that was not possible before—they have just made access to such images much cheaper and easier.

“It’s a question of the policy and the thinking catching up with the technology,” says Mr Hanke. “Ease of access alters the debate.” Google insists that it takes security concerns very seriously, and points out that the American government’s official position is that the benefits of making satellite images widely available outweigh the risks. Indeed, some jurisdictions are embracing the exposure. The Canary Islands have donated high-resolution imagery to Google in the hope that virtual visitors might become real tourists, and the city of Berlin has made its painstakingly detailed digital models available through Google Earth.

For governments that are used to hiding things from each other’s spy satellites, the advent of the geobrowsers does not change things very much. Ordinary members of the public can now call up images of Chinese nuclear submarines via Google Earth, but intelligence agencies around the world have had access to far more detailed satellite images for years. And the fact that the submarines can be seen at all means that China is not trying to keep their existence a secret. Even so, armed forces do find the geoweb useful. The American military is a big user of both World Wind and the enterprise version of Google Earth. And some governments do have grounds for concern: the government of Sudan, for example, would undoubtedly prefer the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum not to highlight destroyed villages in Darfur via an overlay in Google Earth.

Close to home, the geoweb turns out to have implications for personal privacy as well as geopolitics. Google’s new Street View feature, launched in May, lets users of Google Maps move through stitched-together street-level imagery of several American cities, giving private citizens a taste of “crowdsourced” surveillance. All the views are of public streets yet, in aggregate, they challenge accepted notions of privacy—especially for those caught doing something naughty as Google’s specially equipped camera van swoops past. Shortly after the feature was launched, users uncovered a car getting a ticket from Miami police, a man scaling a locked gate in San Francisco and another man entering a shop selling sex toys.

“When the coverage is everything and everywhere, there is going to be a big problem,” says Lee Tien, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet campaign group. Satellite images are not detailed enough to allow individual people or vehicles to be identified, but faces and licence plates can be seen in Google’s Street View. There are few legal precedents. In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued to keep her Malibu estate out of an online library of images of the California coast. She lost. Although movie stars are more stalked than most—several sites provide geobrowser links to celebrities’ homes—it is easy to imagine innocent annotations that could be unintentionally dangerous. Shelters for battered women, for example, often prefer not to make their locations widely known.

Google’s Mr Jones believes the benefits are strong enough to overcome these concerns. “I think there’s a social barrier to everything new,” he says. The availability of useful information will outweigh concern over surveillance and loss of privacy, he believes. Five or six years ago, he notes, people worried about the spread of camera phones. But now “everyone just presumes that everybody has a camera on their phone—it’s nothing special.” The lesson of previous technologies, he says, is that “we all are happy to tolerate things that would have previously been considered intolerable.”

Indeed, all the features—good and bad—of the internet will eventually gain new dimensions on the geoweb. Bots and intelligent agents will crawl it. It will be populated by avatars, as Second Life becomes first life, and it will enable the inverse: telepresent machines roaming the real world. Ghostly, private worlds will be overlaid on reality, sensitive only to members. The malicious possibilities are sobering: location-based viruses, geohacking and, worst of all, geospam.

Despite these concerns, the potential of the geoweb is not lost on investors. Since the beginning of last year more than 20 geospatial firms have been the targets of mergers and acquisitions, with Google, Microsoft and ESRI among the buyers. But it is not quite time to declare the dawn of Web 3.0. For one thing, consumer geobrowsing does not make any money. Microsoft’s Mr Tao says that revenue has to come from advertising for now, until critical mass enables location-based transactions. Google, true to form, is investing first and worrying about revenue later.

The road to Web 3.0

A more immediate hurdle is on the verge of resolution. Google recently submitted KML, the tagging protocol that describes how objects are placed in Google Earth, to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), a standards body. This will let other firms support it. GML, a protocol developed by the OGC to encode spatial-information models, was formally adopted as an international standard this year. Standards for dynamic geodata, the sharing of 3-D models of buildings and geodata from sensor networks ought to be in place by next year. All this will ensure interoperability and do for geodata what the web did for other forms of data, says Carl Reed, the OGC’s chief technologist.

At the same time, the incorporation of satellite-positioning technology into mobile phones and cars could open the floodgates. When it is available, simply moving about one’s neighbourhood can then be tantamount to browsing and generating content without doing anything, as demonstrated by a company called Socialight. Its service lets mobile users attach notes to any location, to be read by others who come along later. Taken further, the result could end up being a sort of extrasensory information awareness, annotation and analysis capability in the real world. “When that happens”, says Mr Jones, “then the map is actually a little portal on to life itself.” The only thing that can hold it back, he believes, is the rate at which society can adapt.