Google and Historypin launch online gallery to celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee

type="html">This year marks the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, celebrating Her Majesty’s 60 years on the throne. To commemorate this special occasion, we’re teaming up with Historypin to launch an interactive online gallery filled with memories of her time as Queen.

The Pinning The Queen’s History project will be made up of photographic images, videos and audio clips pinned directly onto a Google Map on the dedicated Historypin site. This will let you see historical images in modern context within Google Maps.

Throughout her six decades on the throne, The Queen has undertaken hundreds of visits around the United Kingdom and 261 official overseas visits to 116 different countries. Historypin is inviting people from around the world to submit photos, videos and other memories of The Queen during these visits.

Using Google Maps and Street View, the Historypin platform enables you to pinpoint the exact location of where the imagery was captured. They’ll be overlaid onto Street View, so you can compare glimpses of the Queen’s 60-year reign with how they look today.

The collection has been boosted by the provision of images from The Queen’s overseas visits taken by press photographers, and by photographs of items from the Buckingham Palace’s Royal Archives. Items from the Royal Archives include the sitar presented to The Queen during her visit to India in 1997, an earthenware vase presented to the Queen by the Prime Minister of Japan and a map showing the air routes around South Australia during the 1954 Commonwealth Tour.

The interactive gallery is an opportunity for anyone to contribute to and celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on one global platform. We’re honoured that Google Maps can form the foundation of this official gallery.

Submit your memories of The Queen at www.historypin.com/DiamondJubilee/.

Posted by Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist, London

(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog)

IPv6: countdown to launch

type="html">Today, we’re joining the Internet Society and several major Internet companies to announce World IPv6 Launch, a coordinated launch of the next-generation Internet protocol on June 6, 2012. This builds on the success and momentum of last year’s World IPv6 Day by adding major contributions from ISPs and home networking vendors. With World IPv6 Launch, we’ll collectively close the gaps and begin to deliver the end-to-end, next-generation Internet.

IPv6 is the replacement for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, which is quickly running out of addresses. The original IPv6 specification was published more than 15 years ago, but for the entire career of most Internet engineers its deployment has always been in the future. Now it’s finally here. The widespread deployment of IPv6 paves the way for connecting together the billions of devices that permeate our livesーboth fixed and mobile, from the largest cloud computing services to the smallest sensors.

Just a year ago, we announced our participation in World IPv6 Day. Since then, the IPv4 address global free pool was officially depleted, each of the five regions around the world receiving one last address block. Soon after, the Asia-Pacific region exhausted its free IPv4 address pool. Hundreds of websites around the world turned on IPv6 for a 24-hour test flight last June. This time, IPv6 will stay on.

For Google, World IPv6 Launch means that virtually all our services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available to the world over IPv6 permanently. Previously, only participants in the Google over IPv6 program (several hundred thousand users, including almost all Google employees [PDF]) have been using it every day. Now we’re including everyone.

The vast majority of users shouldn’t notice, but check out our test page and help article if you think you might run into difficulty. If you’re curious, you can test your connection now at ipv6test.google.com. If your ISP isn’t on board yet, ask them to join us. It will take years for the Internet to transition fully to IPv6, but as William Gibson is said to have said, “The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.”

We hope that even more websites, application and Internet access providers and network device manufacturers will join us for World IPv6 Launch. Permanently enabling global IPv6 access to Google services has been our goal since we first began our IPv6 project more than four years ago. We eagerly await the opportunity to realize that goal with our colleagues around the world this June. At long last, IPv6 will be the new normal.

Posted by Erik Kline, IPv6 Software Engineer, Tokyo