Blogging can take a long time when you’re on a Parisian terrace café distracted by the locals on a springtime weekend. As they say, Ceçi n’est pas un geoblogue:
- Street View coming to Europe (and more): Google Street VIew cars are spotted in Milan. Digital Earth blog points us to some really interesting intel on what the cars are carrying — lasers, which allow a true 3D model of the surroundings to be made. Paste a series of panorama photos onto this model, and suddenly we have ourselves the holy grail of 3D city recreations — one where you can “step out” of the Street View locations and roam at will.
- Autotechnogeoglyphics: Pruned enlarges my vocabulary with a word every aerial imagery aficionado should know.
- New Google Earth-based high-school lesson: “A Management Plan for Stonehenge: Real-world decision making” by Juicy Geography‘s Noel Jenkins.
- “Google uncovers hidden Pilbara find”: So sez the Australian. It could also have been found with an ESRI tool, but I think the point is that it was found with Google Earth instead.
- Google Sky content: Google Earth Blog notes some new default layers in Google Sky, featuring video tours of astronomical objects. (More about the Celestron tie-in here.)
- What’s in a name? Mikel Maron on OpenStreetMap’s first naming war, over Cyprus.
- KML and HTML, cont.: Google Earth’s Michael Jones chimes in on his “KML is the HTML of geographic content” analogy that spawned a long comment stream on James Fee’s blog.
- Google YouTube fest: Seven how-to YouTube videos by geoGooglers, including some on KML.
- Search via visual landscape queries? It sounds too good to be true, but some Android developers are working on an app that will let you point the camera at an urban horizon and get information back about what you see.
- Australian models: ZNO Blog has recently come out of hibernation; just in time to tell us about a collection of Australian architectural models in Google Earth, courtesy of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
- GPS Camera: Altek announces a digital point-and-shoot with built-in GPS, to be released in the second half of 2008. (Alternatively, how about a GPS device with a camera?) (Thanks Jonathan!)
- Mapping Congo jungle villages: The BBC reports on the Rainforest Foundation‘s efforts to map remote villages in the Congo.
Street view in Europe – it will be interesting to see how far the cameras penetrate the irregular historic parts and widespread pedestrianized streets of European cities – think Amsterdam – and Milan may have be first as its extensive grid pattern of streets resembles a US city.