The Map Room

NASA’s Earth Observatory provides Landsat 5 images of Las Vegas in five-year intervals from 1984 to 2009. The images show the city’s incredible rate of growth over that period. They also line up perfectly, so once again I’ve taken the liberty of turning them into a slideshow:

Update (March 2): Frank Taylor has done me one better by putting these images into a KML file to be used with Google Earth 5’s time slider feature.

The big news so far from Where 2.0 is the announcement of Google’s street-level imagery for five U.S. cities — Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and (of course) San Francisco — which, in a fit of originality, they’re calling Street View: Google Earth Blog, Google Lat Long, O’Reilly Radar.

It doesn’t normally appear in my browser window, but adding &gl=us at the end of the URL string, as Frank’s commenters suggest, does the trick. I wonder what’s up with that, and why that hack works. Anyway, if it doesn’t show up normally when viewing one of the five cities, try that. (Update 5/30: It’s working for me now without the hack.)

This is not the first instance of street-level imagery to come to an online mapping service, to be sure (see earlier efforts by A9 and Microsoft), but Google’s implementation is well-integrated into the rest of its maps — roads with street-level imagery are outlined in blue — and the user-interface, as you might expect by now, is really good.

There’s also this very strange video tutorial:

Las Vegas’s monorail, which opens July 15, connects several hotels/casinos along the Strip (naturally). Here’s a map of the line. Via Slashdot.