With all the new imagery of Australia, we were really hoping to find a shark – but we had no idea that the first shark discovered would be quite this big!

Creating the shark’s eye with a solitary tree was a particularly brilliant idea we thought!

Thanks to Andrew.

There’s some absolutely fantastic looking cars here at the NRMA Motorfest, which was captured in super-high resolution as part of the Australia Day Flyover. The event takes place each Australia Day in Sydney, and is the biggest outdoor display of vehicles in the southern hemisphere.

The full festival programme says other car-oriented events were staged on elsewhere, but I haven’t been able to find any so far. I did find a good Flickr set of the event, but unfortunately it doesn’t name the cars! So I guess we’ll have to rely on the petrol heads to fill us in…

Thanks to… me! Go me

The super-high-resolution aerial images of Sydney from the recent Australia Day flyover have this morning been added to Google Maps.¹

Google even did some sightseeing of their own in the email announcement when they included links to Queenscliff Bay, Shark Bay, Bondi Beach, Manly Beach, Luna Park, a Navy Ship, a Tall Ship, Fort Denison, Circular Quay and a totally awesome Helicopter in flight!

However we refuse to be outdone! So here’s some of the best sights we found ourselves, such as a kid on a swing, with a cool shadow…

…the words SEX + DEATH formed in grass beside a weird glass pyramid…

And people playing table tennis. On a floating table tennis table!²

The Australia Day event is different to the rest of Google’s aerial photography, as they actually pre-announced when the plane would by flying over, and even provided a tracker so that you could tell exactly when it would be overhead.

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, lots of people naturally took the opportunity to do some serious advertising. One local company spent 10,000 AUD on a huge vinyl sign, whilst many others were attempting to promote everything from websites to dating services, and one person in particular even tried to do some promotion for their own political campaign…

It wasn’t all rampant capitalism though – one man staged an effort to send a message to his estranged wife, in an attempt to secure a reconciliation via the medium of Google Maps…

However, it would seem that all this effort was in vain, as it was later reported that the plane had taken a different flight path than originally described, and didn’t actually arrive at each spot at the planned time, and also didn’t cover nearly so much ground.

According to the SMH article:

At Bondi Beach, Erland Howden and a team from the Nature Conservation Council of NSW rallied over 50 troops together to create a human sign that read “Vote Climate”.

So, we scoured the images of Bondi Beach for any signs of a message. We found lots of new entries for our list of the Top 10 Naked People (and we may yet get to have a Top 100 Half-Naked Hot Chicks post!³), but by the time the plane actually arrived all the climate change campaigners had given up and gone home, as apparently they were suffering from sunburn (I’m sure they were well aware of the irony).

Here the story gets suspicious however. Again, from the SMH article:

Michael Fox and his wife Jodie Fox also had a run in with bureaucracy in the Moore Park, near Fox Studios. Using coloured pieces of A4 paper held down with bamboo satay sticks, the couple and a friend had formed the image of a giant eye.

So we located Moore Park on Google Maps, and yet strangely (despite the fact that this is newer imagery than is currently available on Google Earth), there is no giant eye here! In fact, it would appear that despite being newly updated, this image wasn’t taken on Australia day at all…

So, after hours of combing through the new images, we’ve found no real examples of private advertising or even any sign that the people of Sydney knew they’d be on Google Maps!

Well, except this of course…

…but given that australia.com is the official website of the whole country, it can’t possibly count as spam, right? If so, does that mean no spam made it through at all? All those folk who spent money on giant banners might be upset, but the Slashdotters would be pleased – they were up in arms about the potential “spamming” of Google Maps.

Some conspiracy theorists may say that the delayed flyover was a last-minute change of heart by Google, who perhaps didn’t want their maps application full of free adverts. And whilst it’s certainly possible that over the last 4 weeks Google have been going through all the images and replacing any remaining sections containing spam, they did actually promote this event as “get yourself on Google Maps”, so they must surely have anticipated what people would do, right?

For the GGSS team (and many other people), today is the last working day before we get to take some much needed time off for Christmas.

So in the only way we know how (and with the help of a field in New Zealand), we’d like to wish all our readers a very Merry Christmas!

Things will be quiet around here for a little while, as we both intend to take a few days off, spend time with our families, exchange gifts, stuff ourselves silly, and stand about in front of the TV swinging our arms manically!

But don’t despair loyal readers! We’ll doubtless be back for a few posts before the New Year, and until then (whether you celebrate Christmas or not) I’m sure you’ll agree with the admirable sentiments of another nearby field.

Have a great festive season everyone!

Thanks to Stephen Maslin.

We recently had a request to find the Neighbours set, and we always like to keep our readers happy, so here is the real Ramsay Street.

If you view in ‘Hybrid’ mode you might accuse my of telling fibs, as this cul-de-sac’s real name is “Pinoak Court”. In the soap it’s called Ramsay Street after the Ramsay family who used to live there.

Wikipedia for Ramsay St.

We might as well make a worldwide soaps tour out of it, so let’s head by the small town that was built for the abysmal failure of a soap called “Eldorado”.

Broadcast by the BBC in 1992-93 it was supposed to be a cross between Eastenders and Neighbours but achieved the success of neither and was swiftly cancelled. I wonder what goes on there now?

Wikipedia for Eldorado.

Set in the fictional West Yorkshire village, Emmerdale is another popular UK soap which is actually filmed near Harrogate in the grounds of Harewood House.

Wikipedia for Emmerdale.

Previously featured: Coronation St & Eastenders

Thanks: John Seddon, Martyn Webster & Bruv