Bloggers scour Google Maps for unusual views

By Alex Pham
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

2:07 PM PDT, August 10, 2007

A knife sharpening truck parked outside of O.J. Simpson's old Brentwood address tops the list of curiosities captured in Google Inc.'s street-level photographs of Southern California.

Others include unflattering snapshots of passers-by, a woman gazing out her window in Encinitas and a sea gull above La Jolla caught in mid-poop.

Bloggers have been scouring Google Maps since Tuesday, when the Internet giant updated its Street View feature to include photos of Los Angeles, San Diego and other Southern California cities shot by vehicles mounted with panoramic cameras.

"There's the voyeuristic element," said Callum Prentice, a San Francisco software engineer who started Streetviewr.com in June to collect images from the first cities captured in the new Google feature. "You see a snapshot of a guy climbing the backside of a building, and you wonder what the back story is."

His Streetviewr blog received 20,000 visitors the day after Google's Southern California upgrade, with many posting links to slices of life captured in the Southland maps.

In La Jolla, a middle-aged man in a green wetsuit makes his way into the water with a surfboard. Another is caught giving an intimate concert, strumming his guitar in Balboa Park in San Diego.

Some of the images resemble Southern Californian postcards, such as the Ferrari driving on Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive and the bikini-clad woman spinning a Hula Hoop around her hips in San Diego.

In the Street View photograph of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, a "Star Wars" Storm Trooper appears to be chatting amiably with Darth Vader.

"First Los Angeles post and (quelle surprise) it's related to the movie business," its Streetviewr caption reads. "The farce is strong in this site."