councilsites cms dev

Google launched full UK coverage of their Streetview layer on Thursday (11 March 2010), and quite frankly my life was put on hold for 5 days. 

On Tues 16 March 2010 I added Street View to the main Godalming map - for those with:

The map still "degrades gracefully" for those who may not be able to experience "Street View", and of course for those without scripting enabled, Google Static maps provides an alternative, and is even easier to use now (as I had previously described elsewhere) .

Google Street View has been available in the UK for about a year, but only in 25 cities.

I may be bold and I might be wrong, but I would guess that Godalming Town Council is probably the first council in the UK to carry Street View maps on their website (and I don't mean simply providing links to Street View).

So what is the relevance of "Street View" to town councils, and why did it cause me to put my life on hold for 5 days?

Well, now we can get on and geocode (pinpoint the location in the real world) all of the litter bins, telephone boxes and grit boxes - as well as verify the location of all the postboxes, car parks and recycling points we already know of - AND NOT rely upon the "upstream councils" to provide that information AND at the same time present that information to the public in a way they will a) find and b) understand.

It is doubly important for the reason I stated above, that town council officers do not have access to expensive GIS systems but with Street View they can now roam around and identify things in the real world, an ability their colleagues in "upstream councils" have just been able to take for granted.

How else could you explain that of all of the councils in all of the 25 cities which have had access to Street View for over a year have failed to enable it for their public websites? (a Google search threw up nothing, neither did my asking my Twitter followers).

I concede that my solution may not perfect by any means, reliant upon Flash and displaying old information in the views (re-runs by the Google Street View car may be infrequent).  Imperfect it may be, but it will provide a huge leap forward for many town councils. 

In the short time these Street Views have been online I have also noticed some other problems with my solution.

I don't have Google Analytics tracking what users are looking or what they are doing, I just know that on average users are spending over 5 minutes in there.

Opera 10 is not displaying the Flash content yet. grrr ...

Please take a look at my solution and let me know if it does not display as you expect.

Thanks for stopping by!

Using Google's web mapping as your local GIS viewer, and using me, Councilsites, as your website (CMS) provider you can now gather and share information about things such as street furniture.

As well as the existing information layers we already display on Google Maps:

There are many more information layers to collected.  Get in touch if you think the time is right to update your town councils' web presence. or visit my site www.councilsites.co.uk