ibn Mas’ud

The Qibla Locator has a new home today. www.qiblalocator.com. It will also be available from its previous location at ibnmasud.com/map.htm till it is fully indexed by google and others.

The new domain was bought from Yahoo but the site itself is hosted on Dreamhost which also hosts ibnmasud.com.

Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, host of ‘The Colbert Report’, rose in popularity after his skewering of President Bush at the Whitehouse correspondents dinner. A comparison of the number of searches on google trends between him and Jon Stewart (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) shows him sky rocketing after the Whitehouse dinner. Jon Stewart also had his moment earlier this year when he hosted the Oscars. The number of searches for Colbert though, seem to be twice as many.

Google updated its maps with high resolution imagery of Islamabad and the other earthquake hit areas that devastated the region last year. These images and that of Karachi were available first through Google Earth, Google’s downloadable map software. Recently they have merged their dataset for the two offerings giving those who haven’t downloaded Google Earth the same view on Google Maps.

The level of detail is close to the best Google has to offer for any location. In the image of Qadafi Stadium National Stadium, for example, you can see that there is a cricket match going on and you can almost count the number of players on the field. In the image to the left is the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, built by the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.