google

First of all google sent a man on a bicycle around Stonehenge to capture the ancient site in virtual mode for Street View. Now it's the archaeological site of Pompeii that's online, allowing Internet users to take a 360-degree tour of the ancient Roman town destroyed by Vesuvius's eruption in 79 AD.

The town's statues, temples and theatres, as well as close-up views of individual houses and shops are all now visible on Street View, allowing armchair tourists - if that is you, did you try King Tut Virtual already? - to satisfy some of their curiosity about the site without falling prey to the hot Campanian summer days.

This summer marked a number of triumphs for Stonehenge: not only did it gain a nextdoor neighbour in newly-discovered Bluestonehenge, but the stone circle topped a poll of British landmarks to be inaugurated in Google's Street View campaign.

The July poll saw 35,000 Brits cast their votes for the nation's favourite spots. And Stonehenge came out on top of a final shortlist of six that includes: the Millennium Stadium; Angel of the North; Loch Ness; Eden Project; and Warwick Castle. Northumberland's Bamburgh Castle was picked as a 'wildcard entry' by co-organisers Visit Britain. It's not even the first poll Stonehenge has topped this year: October saw it crowned the king of Britain's tourist sites, according to a Travelodge childrens' survey.

Google will soon begin digitising artefacts and documents at Iraq's National Museum, chief executive Eric Schmidt said on a visit to Baghdad. Some 14,000 digital images taken from the museum will be freely available online from the beginning of next year.

The National Museum of Iraq - opened in 1924 with a focus on objects from the Ur excavations  and home to an extraordinary collection of Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian artefacts as well as rare Islamic texts - suffered damage and looting caused by the Iraqi war and only reopened to visitors February this year. Some 6,000 artefacts were recovered, but at least that many - some over 10,000 years old - remain missing and are probably in private collections abroad.

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Update: The issue is resolved. We can access our account again, all information is still there, and embeds still working. Yet, no word of explanation from YouTube.

I walked into the office this morning and our Youtube account was shut down. Why? No idea. We have about 20 videos up on our channel which were commissioned or created directly by Heritage Key, many from Sandro Vannini. A few of the videos we posted only after getting permission from the creators. All the content was credited. We made captions for most files as well.  We have the entire transcripts posted on our site. If we made some mistake we certainly would have addressed immediately. Our many popular Heritage Key videos including King Tut's Death Mask, Animal Mummies Explained or Zahi Hawass Discovers New Tombs in the Valley of Kings are not available on Youtube right now.

Recently Google is featuring more and more 'ancient history' in their daily logo-designs. I joked about the Staffordshire Treasure getting it's own - following Ida to eternal internet fame - but apparently, today we're celebrating the famous Chinese thinker and social philosopher Confucius' 2,560th birthday. Philosopher Kong Qui through his teachings founded Confucianism, a complex system of moral, social, political and philosophical thoughts that has a tremendous influence on the history - and even still on today's culture - of East Asia.

Scientists in Israel claim they've found the answer to unlocking some of the ancient world's best-guarded secrets, with an exciting new algorithm. The cutting-edge computer program recognises handwriting patterns in much the same way as police fingerprinting technology. And its creators say it could be ready to roll out across the world in as little as two years' time. The program can not only read certain writers' styles, but can also 'fill in gaps' in faded or damaged texts, and can even pick through words that have been written over. It's makers are hoping it can save historians and liturgists days of work picking through scrambled texts. And Italy Bar-Yosef, one of the pioneering team from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, tells Reuters things can only get better for the device. "The more texts the program analyses, the smarter and more accurate it gets," he says.

Atlantis has got to be one of the world's most longstanding myths. Devised by Plato over 2,500 years ago, its popularity has rarely waned, and has been the birthplace for some of humanity's most truly bizarre theories. From Gibraltar to the Aegean, it seems everyone's had their say on the whereabouts of the mysterious island, that was supposedly created by Poseidon. Not all of Atlantis' proponents, it must be said, are total crackpots. There's logic, bathymetric studies and topographical data to back their claims - however spurious they may frequently seem. Others most definitely do fit the conspiracy theorist bill, however, and you'll see from some of these possibilities that Plato's baby has been stretched to within an inch of its life to squeeze some credibility into a hopeless hunch. Yet despite all this hot air - or because of it - Atlantis still manages to capture the imagination of people the world over, and is rarely out of the news across the globe.

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Continuing the Google Earth Tours here at Heritage Key, which have so far covered Rome, Athens and London, this week's tour looks at Ancient sites across the historically rich nation of Egypt. An ancient civilisation which boasts some of the most famous relics in the world, such as The Great Pyramid of Giza and the Temple at Thebes.

The written form of communication has been going on for millennia, although admittedly they did write on whatever was lying around.. be it stone, clay or that rather wide tree trunk. The Ancient Egyptians developed the first alphabetical system at around 1800BC, although nobody thought to add in punctuation for another 1000 years. Imagine that! It'd be like.. well, like how the kids of today communicate through their mobile phones, I guess..

There are several historical texts which are considered to be public domain, meaning that they are not covered under copyright in themselves. However, copyright law tends to get more complex when it comes to photographs of ancient works, or indeed, historical texts, scrolls or documents.