Google Street View's camera car set to come to Oslo and Bergen in Norway

"Google Street View Car in Bristol" - Creative Commons (Foto: Byrion@Flickr)

Great news - we get to see what Norway looks like from the street very soon. NRK.no has an article here on Google's plans.

Google Street View is Google's map service where you can see photos taken on the street in a number of areas around the world. With a car with a camera on the roof they drive around and continually take pictures.

In a news conference Wednesday Google revealed that the car will come to Norway on Thursday, wrote DinSide.no.

Oslo and Bergen will be the two first cities that will be photographed.

Google does not want to reveal the time and duration, but say that it can take months to cover just one city, with changes depending on weather and traffic. After the images are collected there is also a process where Google takes out faces and licence plates. The cameras only take pictures that anyone could take, and do not move into restricted areas, walkways, etc.

Communications manager for Google Norway, Thomas Jensen, said to DinSide that Street View is cleared in advance with the authorities, and that Google has not encountered any resistance here in the country.

The article it references from DinSide.no is here. Most of the comments below the article there are pleased with Google's car coming to the two cities and hope that the cities will be as clean as possible over the next while in order to look nice to the rest of the world. It's spring now so the cities should look quite nice once they're processed and available online...unless the so-called russetiden (graduation) from 1 to 17 May ruins everything (as some other commenters have written). Here's what Wikipedia has on some of the activities during that time:

The knots on the string of the russ' cap are a wide variety of rewards signalling that the student has fulfilled a certain accomplishment during the russ period. They can be simple knots or tokens attached to the string. Lists of assignments and associated knots are publicized each year by russ committees at schools and communities. The knot often consists of an item representing the accomplishment. For instance, passing through the back seat of a car stopping on a red light (inspired by the television advertisement for the sweet Menthos), earns you a piece of wrapping from the sweet. The russ knot list was first introduced in the 1940s.

The knot rules are sometimes criticized because they can involve illegal acts, such as public nudity or public sexual intercourse, outright assault and possibly self-harming actions such as consuming large amounts of alcohol in a short span of time (earning a beer cap or wine cork). Other more benign tasks exist, such as putting a for sale sign on a police car, kissing a person of the same sex (pink feather), or spending the night at a teacher's house and making him/her breakfast in the morning, all without being noticed. Counting both national and local lists, there can be hundreds of different tasks that can be performed to gain knots, with huge varieties between districts and individual schools. (http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1015772.ece)

A few russ knot examples:

• Spending a night in a tree (earns a stick from the tree)
• Eating a Big Mac in two bites (earns a piece of the wrapping)
• Drinking a bottle of wine in 20 minutes (earns the wine cork)
• Crawling through a super market while barking and biting customers' legs (earns a dog biscuit)
• Spending a school day crawling on hands and knees (earns a toy shoe)
• Spending the entire russ period sober (earns a fizzy drink cork)
• (New) getting into the U.S. tactical asylum (earns an American flag)
• (New) egging U.S. forces in the tactical asylum (earns a dozen eggs, usually for more egging).

The most popular comment below is this one:

Horer, narkomane og tiggere! Velkommen til Norge. <-- "Prostitutes, drug addicts and beggars! Welcome to Norway."