Over at the Google Earth forums, a user called Thomas de Bruin has assembled a complete alphabet made of shapes spotted in the Dutch landscape by the Google aerial cameras.

He has created capitals, small letters, and all kinds of miscellaneous characters, such as the ten digits and the euro character. You will also find a KMZ file there, so that (if you have a copy of Google Earth installed) you can look up what part of the Netherlands you are looking at.

(Link: Google Earth Blog.)

Google has had a tricycle custom built to take photos in locations that Street View cars and vans have difficulty accessing. They already had the trike take pictures in Italy and the United Kingdom, and now it is heading to the Netherlands.

If you like, you can vote which Dutch locations will get the Street View treatment, candidates include the old Parliament buildings, the Efteling theme park, and the Scheveningen boulevard which sports the only pleasure pier of the country.

(Link: Algemeen Dagblad. Photo of an Efteling dragon by Jeroen Kransen, some rights reserved.)

If the case of car dealer Zwartepoort against website Miljoenhuizen.nl has been in the news before, it can only have been as the sort of easily mocked example of how some folks start lawsuits over really anything and everything, no matter how trivial and unwinnable their cases are. But now Zwartepoorte have gone and won theirs. When you searched Google for the company name, you would get amongst others a result from Miljoenhuizen.nl seemingly explaining the car dealer had gone bankrupt. You know the type:

Full name: Zwartepoorte. Specialty: BMW … This company has gone bankrupt.

These abstracts are machine generated. Google takes disparate phrases from a website and combines them into an abstract. Miljoenhuizen.nl obviously feels that the wrong people have been sued. Miljoenhuizen.nl told De Telegraaf (Dutch): “If the search result were to imply or insinuate that Zwartepoorte has gone bust, it would be Google’s responsibility, not ours.” I would take that a step further and say that nobody should have been sued in the first place.

It will be interesting to see what reasoning judge Sj. A. Rullman will come up with to explain her judgment. Meanwhile, I am waiting with trepidation to be sued by BMW car dealers, as I have my own story of the power of Google to tell. The last few weeks of December I got a constant stream of phone calls from people wishing to buy a nice shiny Beamer. My initials are B.M.W., and as it turns out I used to be the first link people would find when they googled for “BMW Amsterdam,” displayed prominently as part of Google Business with a map and a phone number. It got so bad that I stopped answering the phone, and started the message on my machine with the statement that “I am not a BMW dealer.” I must has cost some poor sod a lot of lost business that way.

Update: fixed type “Miljoenenhuizen.nl” to “Miljoenhuizen.nl.” Thanks, Nico.

Link: Iusmentis (Dutch). Photo by Gyver Chang, some rights reserved.

“The Dutch don’t know how to Google,” Bright.nl thinks (Dutch). Google has recently published its Zeitgeist 2008, a list of the things people have been googling for this year. The Dutch top 5:

1. hyves
2. youtube
3. marktplaats
4. google
5. weer

(Emphasis mine. Marktplaats is the Dutch eBay, “weer” means weather.)

Yes, that’s right, the Dutch google “Google” to get to Google. Don’t gloat yet, as the lists for other countries look surprisingly similar, with the names of typical Dutch sites replaced by local favourites. As Bright points out, these results likely have more to do with “the bankruptcy of the address bar” than with a sudden dumbing down of society.

Here’s a clip from hit British series The IT Crowd called “Never Ever Type Google Into Google”

The final phase of Android Developer Challenge I is now complete. Out of 50 teams of finalists, 10 teams received a $275,000 award each and 10 teams received a $100,000 award each. One of the $275,000 winners is Eric Wijngaard with his mobile operating system PicSay.

PicSay allows you to quickly add word balloons, titles, and props to the pictures you have taken with your mobile phone camera. Enhance them further with various color correction, highlighting, and distortion effects, and then easily share them with your friends and family via e-mail, your blog, or photo sharing sites on the web.

(Link: code.google.com)

Google’s recent announcement to launch Knol, a portmanteau for Knowledge Portal, cannot register the domain knol.com as it has been owned by a Dutch cleaning machine company of the same name in Dordrecht, South Holland for years.

The amusing part is that all of sudden Knol’s website is immensely popular, as the world assumed Google owned knol.com. When I heard of the project, my first impression was that it sounded Dutch, and now I know why. Hilco Knol in true Dutch merchant style was quoted as saying, “It will get interesting if they [Google] come with a six-zero figure since the Dutch tax office will take 52% of the amount that I would get for selling the website name. An offer of a million or more would be much sweeter.”

(Link: zibb.nl)