Google Maps Updated with North Korean Terrain but No Street View
Fire up your Google Maps app and you'll now find that there's more detailed information for North Korea, a territory that up until now was left mostly blank. A community of citizen cartographers collaborated using Google Map Maker to fill in many of the blanks, including road names and points of interest.
"We know this map is not perfect — one of the exciting things about maps is that the world is a constantly changing place," Google stated in a blog post. "We encourage people from around the world to continue helping us improve the quality of these maps for everyone with Google Map Maker. From this point forward, any further approved updates to the North Korean maps in Google Map Maker will also appear on Google Maps."
Ironically, people living in North Korea probably won't be able to see the new mapping information. Rather than embrace the Internet and all that it offers, North Korea censors most of the web, leaving access to just a small number of websites, most of which are owned by the government.
People living in other parts of the world where no such restrictions are in place can now view everything from hotels to labor camps, at least from a distance. There's no Street View option, and probably wont' be for a long time to come.
The latest revision to Google Maps comes just a few weeks after Google's Eric Schmidt visited North Korea, where he met with officials in hopes of convincing them to ease restrictions on the Internet.
"We know this map is not perfect — one of the exciting things about maps is that the world is a constantly changing place," Google stated in a blog post. "We encourage people from around the world to continue helping us improve the quality of these maps for everyone with Google Map Maker. From this point forward, any further approved updates to the North Korean maps in Google Map Maker will also appear on Google Maps."
Ironically, people living in North Korea probably won't be able to see the new mapping information. Rather than embrace the Internet and all that it offers, North Korea censors most of the web, leaving access to just a small number of websites, most of which are owned by the government.
People living in other parts of the world where no such restrictions are in place can now view everything from hotels to labor camps, at least from a distance. There's no Street View option, and probably wont' be for a long time to come.
The latest revision to Google Maps comes just a few weeks after Google's Eric Schmidt visited North Korea, where he met with officials in hopes of convincing them to ease restrictions on the Internet.
