And the earth was without form and void.

In the battle of the Titans for Mother Earth, Microsoft's Virtual Earth is slugging it out with Google's Earth. Apart from the admittedly deep satisfaction of peering at a fuzzy image of your own house from a long way up in the sky, plus finding spare vacant plots of land, I can't see a lot of use for either. Nevertheless, every single London estate agent has signed up for both, presumably in pursuit of that elusive mini-development site. And I guess a lot of architects are signed up for the same reason. Virtual Earth has been the source of much amusement because when you look for rival Apple's R & D campus site at Cupertino you get a vacant lot.* The official reason is that this is because the relevant aerial photo is a rather old one. Good explanation, but hey, to be of any use, the photos must be up to date. Google Earth was effortlessly doing pre- and post-hurricane satellite photos of New Orleans. So there. There is a down side to up-to-dateness: Google is, along with images of the rest of the surface of our planet, running satellite pictures of every military installation on earth. Take a look at some at www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/13/google_earth_threatens_democracy. Thai and South Korean generalissimos have apparently been bitching like mad. The rest seem to take the view that if everybody knows, who cares. A very nice feature of Google Earth is Google Moon at http://moon.google.com. There's a slider towards the top left. Slide it up towards the + sign and happy lunar surfing. All right, another geek joke.

*the page is at http://terraserver.com/imagery/image_usgs.asp?cpx=122.04708457508015&cpy=37.31810903147848&usgs_res=13&provider_id=200&t=pan)