This one is still developing, so it’s hard to tell for certain just how much is real, and how much is hoax.

Slashdot link to the story/discussion, with lots of links there to the rest of the story:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/24/1646205

The basic set-up is that a small Russian town held an outdoor concert, and after figuring out the timing of when the satelite that takes the Google Maps images would be passing over, arranged the audience, with many yellow raincoats, to form a large smiley face for the satelite, to get this image added to the G-maps database.  Supposedly Google found out about this, and updated their database with the image much more rapidly than they usually do, so as to get the smiley face up and visible as fast as possible.

The story hit Slash-dot, and was quickly disected to pieces.

There are ground photos of the event itself, so it certainly appears to have actually occurred.

The ground photos, however, show the sky as overcast, making it impossible for the Google satelites to have imaged the event.

There are screen grabs of the G-maps page, showing the smiley face.  But now, anyone going to the right place in Gmaps gets the same square, but no concert or smiley face.  So either Google has reversed themselves and taken down the smiley face images, or the screen grabs are fakes.

So, at this point, it looks like the event did happen, but that it did not, and likely will not, make it up onto G-maps.

Hmm, when I go to it, the story has a link to the Google Maps page, and when I click on that, there’s an image of the smiley face…

You mean the links in the summary at the top, or somewhere down in the comments?  The ones at the top take you to 1) a blog about the situation, 2) the screen-grab mentioned previously, and 3) a bunch of ground or near ground level pics of the event.  I suspect you may be referring to #2, which is not a link to G-maps itself, but rather to the screen grab.  Part of the big question in all this is the validity of that screen grab.  Is it a real grab off of G-maps, or a photo-shop job?

Ah.  Must’ve been the screen-grab.

From digging in the slashdot comments, here’s a link to the right location, as currently seen in G-maps:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode;=&q=Tscheljabinsk+Russland&ie=UTF8&cd=1&ll=55.16035,61.402127&spn=0.004952,0.007499&t=h&z=17

Interesting.  There’s a big gray square there that says “we’re sorry, we don’t have imagery for this zoom level in this region.”

I thought most of their photos were taken by airplane.

They use both, I believe.  Lots of the world is covered only by satellite imagery.  Some has more high-rez aerial imagery.  They’re all mixed together in G-maps, and it’s hard to tell which is which from just looking at the images.

I think its a screen-shot