In the book Snow Crash, Hiro Protagonist does hardcore deep research in realtime by using a piece of software called “earth.” It’s a convenient visual presentation of thousands of databases, natural language query engines, and satellite imagery. It presents this information as a rotating globe hovering above his desk – it can zoom infinitely, and gives him jump-points to huge quantities of information.

The interesting thing is, all of the individual pieces to make this a reality are coming together. I thought I’d write up an overview of a couple interesting potentially complientary technologies that, combined, would make Hiro’s Earth a reality.

A few years back, Microsoft teamed with a number of companies to create terraserver, a giant searchable satellite photo database. There was anti-microsoft ranting but eventually people realized it wasn’t being used for anything other than “Hey, look! My neighborhood!” ego surfing.

Enter Earthviewer. It presents all of that hellaciously detailed mapping data and satellite photography on an [infinitely zoomable globe on your computer’s desktop. Click and drag. Spin Earth around. Then zoom in on the Chicago suburbs until you see my house. I’m not kidding – it’s that detailed.

Tie that in with realtime data instead of cached data, and you’ve got every cyberpunk’s dream screensaver.

In a similar vien, J-Track is a free Nasa project that gives you realtime satellite positioning data. Pop it open, see where GPS-II is, or track a few Iridium birds.

Of course, there’s always the multitude of data on world population, economic, and weather that could be slapped onto a system like this.

But take it farther. Why can’t route finding and city-guide information be integrated into this kind of interface, too? Click on a point on the map. Click on another. Tell it to find the best route. Instead of just seeing a computer generated map, you could watch the route overlay on an actual arial photo of the city. Zoom in. Look at it from different angles. The whole deal.

More unsettling possibilities exist, too. Amazon.com already tracks geographical popularity of each of their products. Want to find out what students at Wheaton College are buying this month? No sweat.

And since it’s all keyed to zip code, it would only make sense to integrate it into a globe interface…

There are tons more that I could link to, but it’s getting late. What stuff does everyone else know of that could tie into this, turning The Globe into the ultimate research tool? Or, alternately, the ultimate Big Brother tool…

This isn’t about paranoia. I don’t think that the makers of these programs are trying to set up a one world government or find out what we had for breakfast. But the *ability* to correlate huge masses of data, and sift through it quickly and easily, means that people WILL start mining it for information.

Are we ready for that?