Short news: gps2geX, Google Earth for CSOs, Shnitzl

  • gps2geX is a Mac utility that takes your GPS position and maps it to Google Earth in real-time. Use it with gpsdX, an open-soruce GPS daemon that lets many applications use the same GPS data simultaneously. Both are written by Australia’s Robin Darroch, and get a great review here.
  • A well-written article for CSO Online, “5 Ways Google is shaking the security world” has a section on Google Earth that is especially worth reading, and not just for chief security officers. Quote: “If your organization’s security plan is based on no one being able to obtain aerial or satellite photography of a facility, then it probably ain’t much of a plan.” (I found the entire article fascinating.)
  • You can tag websites. You can tag physical places. So why not tag events? Austrian collaborative community site Shnitzl lets you do precisely that. And since events have to happen somewhere, venues are automatically mapped to Google Maps and Earth. There’s an RSS feed for every venue, as well as a global RSS feed, and same goes for Google Earth files. Shnitzl is still in beta — the events are for Vienna only, the RSS could use geoRSS tags and iCal format support would be nice — but this is solid Web 2.0 work. (Upcoming.org is a full-featured event tagger, but doesn’t fly you to Google Earth. And Shnitlz feels leaner, in a good single-minded-purpose kind of way.) (Via Google Earth Community)
  • Google Earth Blog finds another (one-man) company offering Google Earth development services: Pierre Racine’s GeoWebService, de QuĂ©bec.
  • “CH2M HILL Enterprise Spatial Solutions Becomes the First Google Earth Certified Partner in the Google Enterprise Professional Program,” boasts a press release. Except that MetaCarta joined yesterday, and they sure use Google Earth too. Bummer.