Google making deals with BC Government on imagery - Nanaimo setting a fine example as an early adopter

Google was making a few headlines in BC at last week's GeoWeb event.. apparently the company has been discussing with the government the possibilities of providing users with additional 3D imagery and other data obtained from the BC Government. From the article... "In a Friday address at GeoWeb 2007 and later in an interview, Google Earth chief technology officer Michael Jones said Google Earth has been in talks with the provincial government, and if the initiative goes ahead B.C. would be the first Canadian province to supply information on such things as traffic and mineral resources to the mapping service. "The provincial government has been talking with us about providing data so that all citizens in the province who use our service will have the best possible data," said Jones. Jones met Thursday with Agriculture and Lands Minister Pat Bell to discuss the initiative." One paragraph in the article got may attention.. regarding the little town in BC that I used to live in... some municipalities are already doing this. Jones said Nanaimo is the most active city in the world when it comes to supplying geographic data to Google Earth. He predicted there will be a time when municipal, provincial and federal geographic information will be shared universally.
"With Nanaimo, they have mapped nearly every conceivable thing using Google Earth and Google Maps," said Jones. "Their citizens have more information about their city than the people of San Francisco." Kudos to the city and in particular Jason Birch! Funny, I was just looking around Google Earth this week-end with my family and was telling them, just wait until our city (Fort Collins) makes high-res imagery and other 3D data available to add to the Google Earth viewer... Nanaimo is setting a fine example although they were very early adopters... the early bird gets the worm!
One last thing, whay aren't there more local governments making their data available via KML / KMZ? With most GIS applications now exporting to KML and the availability of fine translation tools from Safe Software it's no longer rocket science. A TIP - For a useful listing of news items relating google maps, Google Earth etc.. see here. For Google earth related apps, tools and translators see here.

See Vancouver Sun Article