Saving the world one heart attack victim and middle eastern island kingdom at a time

I just saw an article from last weekend’s Financial Times that lauds the use of Google Earth as a tool helping to “speed the march towards a more egalitarian society” in Bahrain.

I know it sounds a bit, well, pollyannaish, but apparently Bahrain is facing an acute housing shortage even while 80 percent of its territory is covered with enormous royal estates and private golf courses and race tracks.

Google Earth upgraded to higher resolution imagery of the island earlier this year, and the government tried to block the site as a privacy measure. This proved an effective way to motivate Bahrainis en masse to check out the aerial views of their kingdom one way or another.

According to Mahmood al-Yousif, a prominent Bharaini blogger interviewed by the FT: “Some of the palaces take up more space than three or four villages,” he said. “People knew this already. But they never saw it. All they saw were surrounding walls.”

The speculation is that the starkly unequal distribution of land so many people saw on Google Earth may affect the outcome of the parliamentary elections on Saturday.

This is a pretty encouraging story about the power of information, you gotta admit, especially for us geophiles. And if you’ve read some of our other posts or visited our website, you might know that FortiusOne is gearing up to release a free community repository for geographic data.

The objective of the repository, along with GeoIQ, is to create accessible geographic information and geo-analytical tools people can use to help them buy homes, locate businesses, and get a leg up on the competition, for instance. But we like to think they might help fight a little injustice or improve environmental stewardship along the way.

So, while we may not ever be able to claim that our web service saved a life, potentially helping to speed the march toward a more egalitarian society will do.