Go Geodeer!:This is awesome: Take one GPS-collared white-tailed deer named Thor. Have his (presumably) coordinates sent regularly via SMS to your email account. Forward email to a blogging service like blogger.com that will publish emails as blog posts. Import resulting RSS feed into Google Spreadsheets. Convert XML to KML using Google Spreadsheet functions. Follow Thor in Google Earth. Hack by Siberian who writes, “I believe this is the fist successful solution of Mail-to-Map service which is based entirely on free web services.” (Thanks to Valery Hronusov for the heads-up.)
Historical geomagnetism: The location of the Earth’s magnetic poles changes over time. Using ships’ logs from as far back as the 1590’s, the Earth’s historical magnetic field has been reconstructed… and now also visualized as time-enabled KML overlays made by Stefan Maus. (Thanks to Peter Selkin for the heads-up.)
Israel does KML: Israel’s tourism agency publishes a collection of tourist attractions in Israel, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Fantastic. Does this mean we can imply a shift in Israeli policy away from suspicion of neogeography to an embrace of the good Google Earth can do?
New Blog II: The Intellog Blog, a developer’s blog about a KML application that maps oil wells.
Update: 12:59: Oops I forgot: Google Earth gets a vector update, reports Google Lat-Long Blog. Stay away from the new default road layer in Africa however. Use the default Tracks4Africa layer instead — it is much more accurate. For example, in the screenshot of a bit of Ethiopia below, blue is Tracks4Africa, yellow is the new road layer. The blue line follows the actual course of the road exactly. Also: Cairo’s street network may be in Google Maps, but it’s not in Google Earth… though this is a good thing, as the one in Google Maps is built from the wrong datum, which means that everything is misplaced about 100 meters to the left.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
