The 57 posts I that have written on my blog to date (now 58), have for the most part been composed just minutes after I got some random idea in my head that I wanted to share.  As such, the posts have been as random as the times that I write them.  For the most part, the content has been technical or Webmail.us related, with a few non-technical posts about getting married, tailgating or whatever else.  Here is a monthly breakdown:

                      N D J F M A M J J A S  TOTAL
technical/Webmail.us: 4 7 7 4 3 2 3 2 5 5 2   44
non-technical/random: 2 2 0 1 1 1 2 1 0 1 2   13

On Monday I asked my readers, What should I post about next?  My goal was to find out if you want to have any influence over the content that I write or if I should continue to do as I have since November 2005 and post whatever is in my head at the moment I get the urge to write.  Only one person responded.  My friend Ryan Reed asked “How does Google Earth do all that new crazy 3D stuff?”.

I’ll conclude from this brief sociology experiment you deeply enjoy what I write and don’t want to mess with a good thing :).  However feel free to comment from time to time and tell me if a post sucked/rocked.

Reed:
Google purchases 3D building datasets for major US cities from a company called Sanborn.  Google also acquired @Last Software who had been independently creating 3D data for Google Earth.  And the satellite images and original Google Earth technology was developed by a company called Keyhole, which Google acquired in 2004. Google takes all of this data, aggregates it, analyzes it and serves it, using their massively distributed storage system called BigTable.  BigTable is built on top of Google File System.  GoogleFS enables them to store seemingly limitless amounts of data and BigTable enables them to make use of that data in any way that their software engineers think might be interesting.  Somebody over there in Mountain View thought it would be cool to create a 3D interface into our planet, and behold Google Earth.