According to Google Maps ‘blue outlined streets’ have Street View, so I was surprised to see that they must have left the car behind one day and hopped on a bicycle, because the Moonee Ponds Creek bicycle trail was outlined in blue just near my house. Alas, the Street View pics don’t give a true representation of the bike path – it seems wider and busier than I remember it.

Uh-oh! algorithm troubles! That looks very much like the nearby tulla freeway. I’m sure we’re going to see a lot more interesting anomolies among the new Australian images.

The face blurring technology is in full swing, and not very discriminate – blurring both the wheels on my car, as well as heaps of other vaguely face like things.

Anyway, I’m pleased I wasn’t imagining things when I spotted the Google car last March.

At the time, as I recall, the aussie dollar was about $us0.65¢ so we were effectively paying about $us1.10 while the US pricing was only $us0.99¢ – that seemed a little unfair at the time, but no-one seemed too fussed.

Roll forward to today: the aussie dollar is sitting on $us0.95¢, but tracks are still the same price, which means we’re actually paying a little over $us 1.60 per track! That’s quite a bit more than our US counterparts – certainly enough to make most CDs better value.

With the parlous state of the US economy and their sliding dollar, I’m sure we’re not the only market where iTunes is starting to look expensive.