The story on Reuters claims that 14,000 photos of the artefacts will be published online in early 2010.

“I can think of no better use of our time and our resources to make the images and ideas from your civilization, from the very beginning of time, available to a billion people worldwide,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a news conference at the Baghdad museum.

“Most American companies are not yet operating in Iraq, and we would like to show that it’s possible to do business in Iraq, that Iraq is an important market that will grow quickly, that it’s sufficiently stable,” he added.

Ah, so the latter quote shows some of the politics involved, but recording, cataloguing and making freely available such an important collection is surely a good thing.

The questions that arise from this news are numerous, and, just to add to the speculation, ReadWriteWeb quote Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt as saying that there will be “a few surprises“.

Will Google be releasing the raw data? Will it be structured? Are Google going to release a collections management system? Will they work closely with other museums?

Definitely one to watch.

Sketchup introduced a tool to export models straight into Google Earth, and the rest is history. The company was bought by Google, who now offer a free version of the software, which is limited in what you can import or export. You will still need the ‘pro’ version if you want to use the software in conjuntion with (i.e. exporting to) CAD or 3D visualisation software.

Archaeologists – it’s very easy indeed to import an AutoCAD DWG into Sketchup (or aerial photos, DEMs or a combination), and have fun trying out different interpretations. You can then export them to Google Earth.

It’s a lot of fun, and dare I say it, rather useful.

Get more info at the Google Sketchup website.

I’ve just tested it and created a small “homepage” (it contains nothing of worth, and won’t be updated!):

The templates aren’t exactly awe-inspiring, but it’s a start.

Google does stress when you sign up (you’ll need a Gmail account), that the service is an early public release (beta), and that there may be problems along the way. And they’re not wrong. In the 10 minutes or so that I used it (in Firefox – Safari on the Mac isn’t supported, of course), I kept getting ‘locking’ messages politely informing me that another user was editing the page, with the option to unlock it and publish anyway. Or being informed that someone else had terminated my editing session:

Creating new pages can be a bit slow, and with no visual feedback once you’ve pressed that “New Page” button, it’s easy to think that you didn’t click the button properly, so you click it again. Nothing seems to happen. Then you find the system catching up, getting confused, and creating two (or more) new pages with the same name…
These things aside – it looks like a handy too for creating small websites with very little technical know-how. I hope that Google incorporate a Blogger (or generic RSS) sidebar, allowing you to knit your ‘homepage’ containing all of your static content, with your chronological blog (sort of like WordPress Pages).

Try it out at http://pages.google.com/