Google Sightseeing 2007 Awards
As 2007 draws to a close we present our choices for the best posts of the year.
Best Mystery
There were numerous contenders for the most confusing or bizarre images, but our pick is the Mystery Plane Outline, as even the generally accepted answer, that these are small rocks arranged in the shape of a plane, still begs the question: “But why bother?”.
Best personal project
In February we were impressed with one man’s attempt to single-handedly recreate a cruise ship in his front drive.
Lamest World Record
The Largest Wooden ship in the world from April easily wins this prize, due to having a less-than-exciting title and the fact that the specially built ship has never even been in the water!
A special mention also goes to the German towns squabbling over who has the most unintentionally leaning building.
Our Brains Hurt Award
Getting our heads around the Island and Lake recursion from September’s Island Week 2 was almost too much, but I think we get it now…
Best Smallest Thing
We loved the idea of the world’s smallest parks from January, but the world’s smallest municipal park was just too darn small to see from satellite! Fortunately, Google now have a street view shot of it.
Best World’s Most Enlarged Thing
In the last year we’ve featured many, many sights that claim to be the “World’s largest something” but our pick for the Best Largest something is the World’s largest fingerprint.
Best Imagery
Undoubtedly the most amazing images to be found in Google Earth are the African Megaflyover project aerial shots, and the best of these images were highlighted in November’s Google Sightseeing Safari.
Best Blurry Pictures
Some of the aerial images in Google Earth are amazingly high resolution, but not high enough for our tour of miniature parks across the globe, which ended up as a list of blurry blobs that sort-of look like the Eiffel tower.
Best Landart
The ancient Incan geoglyph of a cat is fantastic, and much more intersting and attractive than kfc’s logo stunt.
Most Ignored Warning
A few days after we posted this year’s April fools joke: “Live Satellite Images in Google Earth” we updated the entry with a banner warning users that it was a prank and there are no live images to be seen. Did anyone read that? Of course not! We still get a new message almost every week from someone who fell for the joke and wants to know where the live images are.
Most In-Depth Post
For a long time it had no decent imagery, so during Island Week this year we really went to town on our Easter Island post, and managed to condense 2,000 years of history into a mere 600 words.
Best Large Type
The rooftop message “Welcome to Cleveland” isn’t very interesting at first glance, until you realise that the message is over 400 miles away in Milwaukee!
So that’s our picks of the year, but with over 250 entries in 2007, what were your favourites?
Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2008 - see you all next year!
Cheers, and thanks for another great year of Google Sightseeing posts.
My favorite mystery is still this one:
http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/12/07/the-ghost-plane-of-mokpo/
Gotta be the hungry hungry hippos for me.
“managed to condense 2,000 years of history into a mere 600 words.”
Which really isn’t that hard to do, considering most of that history is lost forever anyway
But thanks for trying — that post rocked!
You can just imagine what all those hippos were saying to each other…
Hey, thanks for the “Best Mystery” honor!!! I don’t have a speech ready, so let me just say you folks are a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes in 2008. HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!
P.S. A small correction: the plane outline is actually made of stacked tires, not rocks.
Here’s what “science” says are our top 20 posts of all time (as calculated by aiderss.com, based on number of comments, diggs, bookmarks etc.)
All time? Didn’t you do anything worthwhile before last year?
@MymsMan: AideRSS only started up last year, and as it uses our RSS feed to see the posts it will only know abut the posts from when it began.
There’s also our ratings page which has the best posts of all time, as voted for by you (However, the ratings feature was only added in the middle of last year, so will also have a 2007 bias).
I like the Mystery Plane Outline. It must of taken a long time to do. Does anyone know how big it is in feet? Someone must have alot of time on their hands.