For the rest of you, the news is straightforward: Google Street View has added imagery from Norway and Finland, and has dramatically expanded its coverage of Canada, including more than 130 cities and major highways; it’s also added ski runs in Whistler by putting the Street View camera on the back of a snowmobile (CBC News, Google Earth Blog, Google Blog, Google Lat Long, Mapperz). New imagery has also been added to Google Earth (and will presumably be pushed out to Google Maps shortly).

But for me, I’m stunned to find that both updates have dramatically improved Google’s coverage of the small town in which I live, with all of 1,500 people. Yes, even my town is in Street View, as are many other Canadian towns and villages of comparable size. (Was it really so long ago that Canada cities with more than half a million people weren’t in Street View?) And the medium-resolution Spot satellite imagery added for the Ottawa region is also a marked improvement — though it’s still a long way from high-resolution aerial photography.

Unexpected!