Google stalks/maps Seattle neighborhoods

It’s a good thing I mowed the lawn in the rain Sunday because it was neat and free of dandelions when the Google’s car with a camera rolled through to get new images of the Ballard area of Seattle.

Google’s Street View project let’s people explore places around the world through 360-degree street level imagery. Cars have been driving around cities since 2007 with their cameras mounted on top of the vehicle. The latest generation of Google’s cameras take high definition images.

This is the first time I’ve seen it in the wild. It’s both creepy and cool, isn’t it?

The creepy part is that it seems like an invasion of privacy , even though it is not. They’re taking images from public streets that anyone could see by driving around the same location. The cool part wins for me. It’s valuable to use the Street View when I’m driving to a location I haven’t been to before in the Northwest and for vacation travel. The Street View image of a hotel in New York, for example, gives me a more accurate impression of the building and the neighborhood than a hotel website’s static image.

Google has also introduced cameras mounted on snowmobiles and large tricycles to map places cars can’t easily get to. The Google Trikes project has been put to use in several major cities taking images of zoos.