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Map of the Strange

Have you seen something interesting on Google Maps, something unexpected? Maybe you noticed a WWII bomber in Northern Italy, a car flying through the air, or a giant penis painted on the roof of a school. If so, go to Map of the Strange to document your find for posterity.

For a great example of unexpected outcomes of a design, take a look at Map of the Strange. This site is devoted to tracking the quirky satellite footage used in Google Maps.

The Black Hole of Hilversum
A strange blemish in the satellite photo over Hilversum in the Netherlands is captured for posterity.

Among the interesting view-from-space images are a Native American with an iPod (near Medicine Hat, Alberta), the work of an avid St. Louis Cardinal fan who made crop circles, the Cerne Abbas Giant (near Southhampton, UK), and a giant marriage proposal in Western Massachusetts. There are also images with small aircraft and photo blemishes, like the one above a building in Hilversum (Netherlands) that is tagged as a ‘black hole.’

Map of the Strange switched servers recently to accommodate a boost in traffic. More eyeballs means more mice adding entries and a new bunch of problems:

An increasing number of visitors are looking at mapofstrange.com and scitor.co.uk, and as a result an increasingly large number of new records are being added – thanks for that! However, this means that we’re getting lots more people telling us where they live, and where Brazil or India or Spain is. Thanks very much for your help, it’s reassuring to know that elementary geography is still being taught in schools, and that the money and time invested by the Google corporation to produce Google maps and Google earth isn’t going to waste. However, we really aren’t interested. Seriously. We couldn’t give a damn that you know the whereabouts of New York. And, again, you might be surprised that nobody wants to know where you live, but hey, we don’t! But if you’ve seen something interesting (a WWII bomber in Northern Italy), unusual (a car flying through the air), or stupid (a giant penis painted on the roof of a school), we really want to hear from you.

It is difficult to imagine this kind of site every coming up in development meetings at Google.

By Kevin Makice

A Ph.D student in informatics at Indiana University, Kevin is rich in spirit. He wrestles and reads with his kids, does a hilarious Christian Slater imitation and lights up his wife's days. He thinks deeply about many things, including but not limited to basketball, politics, microblogging, parenting, online communities, complex systems and design theory. He didn't, however, think up this profile.

5 replies on “Map of the Strange”

Good question. The message is that the account was suspended. I wonder if that means it is heading somewhere else, or if it posted something it shouldn’t have.

Since the WebHostingBuzz site allows for registration, I went ahead and put in a tech support request to ask, even though I have nothing to do with the site. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll provide some info.

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I did get lucky (although maybe it’s not a good thing for the account holder that they responded, especially since I’m not the account holder):

Unfortunately we had to suspend your customer account ‘googlear’ on shared3 for server resource abuse. You can find related details below. This account may be unsuspended (please contact us) in case you’ll agree to take measures to prevent further resource abuse. If this is impossible and this account is resource-intensive by its nature, probably you should consider upgrading your account to dedicated or semi-dedicated.

So, my guess is this site will resurface either with better code or a bigger hosting account.

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