Wish List

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has posted a link to a Google Maps image that looks like an iPod.

The story that this is an abandoned mine that was won by Steve Jobs in a poker game sounds too good to be true, but the image got me thinking: I wonder how good the results would be for a “find the closest match to this image in Google Earth” app — something that picks the best location and zoom level for a given query image from all the locations on Earth. The feature’s no doubt already in place in some GIS systems (for things like “here’s an unannotated fly-by image of a missile silo; find the likely origin”) but I’m really just thinking for arty things like “create a font of letters made up entirely of satellite and fly-by images.”