links for 2009-05-25
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Project site and blog of Sean Askay's amazing KML file mapping US and coalition troop deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan
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ConnoteaAugmented reality apps: Sky Map for Android is just the beginning
I experienced Android envy for the first time last week when Google released their Sky Map for Android — envy, because in addition to using GPS and pitch & roll detection, the app also puts Android's built in magnetometer to work, and that is not something my iPhone has.
Rumor has it, however, that the next iPhone will come with a magnetometer, and so we can assume that by this time next year, all smartphones will avail themselves of the GPS/pitch & roll detection/compass technology trio. What other uses could this technology be put to, besides pointing you to objects in the sky?
Probably the biggest potential is for photographs. If the phone can tell at what angle your are holding it and in what direction you are pointing it when taking a photo, in addition to where exactly and when (and what the viewing angle of the lens is), and you upload all this metadata along with the photo to the cloud, then services like Panoramio and PhotoSynth will have all the information they need to start constructing a crowdsourced 3D simulacrum of the world, photo by photo. PhotoSynth already does some of this by trying to calculate roll, pitch, direction and viewfinder angle of a photo by comparing it to photos taken in the vicinity, but it should get a lot better if it has starting values for these variables, even if they are not completely accurate.
I wonder how long it will take for DSLRs to incorporate this technology. There have been GPS modules for cameras for a while now, but (to me at least) the advantage of having coordinate metadata attached immediately to the image file by the camera is outweighed by the requirement of having the GPS unit be physically attached to the camera — Especially as a proper GPS unit can be kept in your rucksack, whose info you can use when downloading the photos to your computer.
Cheap pitch, roll and direction detection changes the game, however. Perhaps at first we'll be taping our Androids and iPhones to the back of our DSLRs, but it can't be long before camera manufacturers realize the benefits of having this information recorded by default. Then, when we upload our photos to the web, we'll be able to automatically generate KML that lets us view the photos from the exact same vantage point in Google Earth.
Another use that this new technology will be put to is augmented reality applications. Sky Map is already an excellent example of a genre that should explode; perhaps we'll see apps for superimposing names of distant mountain peaks on your screen (à la HeyWhatsThat); or an app that lets us "x-ray" the planet, so we finally know where precisely Buenos Aires is beneath our feet. Games will no doubt take advantage: Any empty parking lot could become a virtual maze, with the phone as your HUD — and you racing against your friends (both close by, in the same space as you, or on the other side of the planet).
In sum, there are plenty of reasons to hanker after tomorrow's gadgets, considering the possibilities...
links for 2009-05-24
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Jeffrey Martin, while at Where 2.0, took this panorama of Google's Street View Cave. Very meta, ergo I like it:-)
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Now the UK's TImes says it was Google that asked Rumsey to cleanse the historical Japan low-caste map. So which way was it?
Ogle Earth and Twitter: Tarpiping it in
The silly thing is, I still constantly monitor my ~1000 feeds for all manner of information, and new neogeo links keep on popping up. There they then sit, aging quickly, until I have a hypothetical moment to turn them in a full-fledged post here on Ogle Earth. Alas, by the time that (currently rare) moment rolls around, the links are hopelessly out of date, even if the commentary might still be worth writing.
Luckily, in these days of falling attention spans, shortening news cycles and the concomitant rise of Twitter, a simple solution is at hand. Saving links for a proper post is so 2008. Instead, let's post them immediately to Twitter with some added snark, collect them on a Delicious account (live RSS feed), and then have Delicious dump them nightly on Ogle Earth for reference.
So, follow @ogleearth on Twitter, and you get tomorrow's links today, live, as I find and post them. And when I post a proper long-form entry on Ogle Earth, @ogleearth will also tell you about it.
All this link-fu needs to happen automatically, of course. But how? I tried some social media aggregation and automation services, all of which had issues, but eventually I hit upon Tarpipe, which is a kind of socialized Yahoo! Pipes.
I love the concept of Tarpipe, and the implementation for the most part works too, even as a beta (Facebook support is still spotty). Either by email or RESTfully, submit text snippets or files, then manipulate and guide these to their final resting place on various social media sites. For example, here is the flow chart for my new publishing process:
In another workflow I've made, I email a photo to Tarpipe to upload it to Flickr, shorten the Flickr photo URL, then post that URL together with my caption to Twitter and (soon, Inch'Allah) Facebook. This way my photos don't get duplicated all over the web, and I keep my authorship rights intact. (Yes, Facebook, I'm looking at you.)
And, to ensure a neogeo angle for this post, I'll mention that Tarpipe comes with a Google Geocoding connector, so you could, if you wanted to, turn place names into Flickr geotags as part of your social media publishing process. And Tarpipe feels like it is only scratching the surface of what is possible — conditionals, for example, would be nice, as well as more social API connectors.
I found that while email works well for submitting content to Tarpipe, it really limits you to two text fields (subject, body), whereas REST lets you have three (title, body, URL). In the end, I adapted Guillaume Riflet's Javascript form submission bookmarklet (why reinvent the wheel?), so now I just need to surf to a page, click the bookmark, add a line of commentary, and submit. It can't possibly take any less time than that. The bookmarklet even works on my iPhone!
(PS: Not until China's censors blanket-banished all sites on the Blogspot.com domain from this side of the Chinese firewall did I realize how much of my tech information comes from there. I find myself turning on my VPN repeatedly during the day as I bounce up against this silliness while trying to access content on blogspot.com. All it does, of course, is raise the cost of this information for China's digerati, as well as removing it for consideration from the rest, including future potential digerati. In both cases, the leadership is hobbling the potential of its citizens.)
links for 2009-05-23
Place marketing - working notes
I'm in China to manage Sweden's web-based public diplomacy effort aimed at the Chinese. The catalyst is Shanghai Expo 2010, a world fair whose sheer ambition will blow all previous efforts out of the water — as is the custom here in China. Sweden will have a pavilion at the Expo, and the groundbreaking for it took place a few weeks ago. Now all that is left is to build it, and then to market it. How to go about this online?
One thing we'll be doing is "place marketing", to make sure the pavilion and its associated website has a presence wherever the geographic web manifests itself. Here's my working list of web destinations where we'll want to "be" — but it applies just as well to any physical location that needs some place marketing:
- Panoramio: We'll have photos of the finished pavilion submitted to Panoramio and visible in Google Earth/Maps before the doors open on May 1, 2010, so that people looking at the Expo site to plan their trip see us above all.
- 360Cities: Uploading panoramas of the exterior and interior ensures their presence on the 360Cities Google Earth layer, but also gives others the ability to embed them on their own sites.
- Photosynth: The technology behind Photosynth is really impressive, and now it has been made into a free online social tool. It's a no-brainer that we'll be photographing every aspect inside and out of the pavilion before the doors open, and then letting Photosynth do its 3D magic on the photos.
- Webcams: Permission-pending, we want to have the construction of the pavilion be visible live on the web, and submitted to Webcams.travel, which georeferences them and also makes them available via their layer on Google Earth.
- YouTube: As you probably know, uploaded YouTube videos get place and time metadata. We've already uploaded a video of the ground-breaking ceremony, Dance of the Excavators, and it is already visible on Google Earth:
(The video is not exactly awesome — but we now know how good the videographer we hired is.) YouTube is blocked in China as of a month ago, because the authorities disapprove of some of the videos posted there. Since our main audience is Chinese surfers without the technical skills or budget to use Tor, proxy servers or VPNs, this channel is not currently the most effective in China. But at least there is always a point to having the Google Earth popups visible to Chinese users, with a dead link, to remind them they are being protected from dangerous information by their government's hardworking gatekeepers. - Google Earth Community: I have no doubt that Google will have updated imagery of the Expo site as it evolves over the coming year, and we'll make sure that the Swedish pavilion gets its own placemark on the Google Earth Community site. At the very least, Google searches for it will now link the name and website to a place.
- Wikipedia: I have no idea if people will make Wikipedia articles about individual pavilions — perhaps the Chinese Wikipedia will have them. I think it is unethical to market yourself via Wikipedia by penning your own article, but if somebody else writes one, I will make sure it contains accurate coordinates, so it can be found on all mapping tools that show Wikipedia content as a layer (and there are quite a few).
- 3D models: The pavilion already exists as an architect's 3DS Max file, so it's a relatively small step to export the model to a Collada file, add photo textures, and submit it to Google's 3D Warehouse as a georeferenced 3D model (and even to Virtual Earth 3DVia — if Microsoft ever releases a 3D browser plugin for operating systems other than Windows.).
These are the places on my radar screen. Now over to you — where else on the geographic web should I be place marketing?
(Instead of beginning each post by apologising for the recent dearth of posts, from now on please just assume such an apology with every post. The truth is, travelling between China and Europe is no commute and I did just that to attend a wedding te previous weekend — georeferenced panoramic evidence here — and since I've been back I've been involved in another massive time waster — moving into my new apartment. Add to that a lack of internet access at home (until just now!) and you get the picture.)
About Street View, privacy, Sweden and the UK
Google Street View cars are apparently combing Stockholm, and when those images finally make it into Google Maps and Earth, I'm pretty sure that the Swedes won't collectively betray anything more than amused curiosity. That's a completely different reaction to the pockets of hysteria that greeted the advent of Street View in the UK, mainly among the gutter press and its readers. Why such a difference? Let's think up some hypotheses.
Both in Sweden and in the UK, Google isn't first to market with a street view product. Since October 2008, a UK company called Seety has made a proprietary street view dataset of London available on the web. Seety's panoramic dataset is even more complete that Google's for central London, as it contains images of plenty of mews and other small streets that Google Street View simply skipped. For example, check out Stanhope Mews East in South Kensington in Seety and in Google Street View. (Well, OK, you can't in Street View.)
(The Mail Online used these holes in Google Street View coverage to concoct a conspiracy theory, of course.)
Meanwhile, in Sweden, the popular Swedish directory and mapping service Hitta.se has had a street view beta available for Stockholm since December 2008, based on MapJack's technology.
One difference between Hitta.se and Seety is that Hitta.se is a well known service in Sweden, and its introduction of street view images received widespread positive coverage in the local media, perhaps even with a frisson of glee that a local hero had beaten Google to market with something. When Google's own imagery arrives, Swedes will see it as a catch-up maneuver; to then also worry about privacy all of a sudden would simply be too obviously hypocritical. Seety, meanwhile, doesn't enjoy nearly the same level of mindshare in the UK. Most Londoners did not know that street view imagery of them and their homes had already been on the web for six months when Google Street View arrived.
Also: Technology journalism is mainstream journalism in Sweden. Swedes are among the most tech-savvy people in the world — bittorrent is no mystery to most of them — and many newspapers have a daily technology section. The tech news agenda in Sweden is not driven by scientifically illiterate hacks at places like The Sun. In the UK, it sometimes is.
Another difference is cultural. The compromise between transparency and privacy is drawn differently in these two countries. Swedes tend to live transparently: Home windows are rarely curtained, with little expectation that others will stop to peer in. Everyone's tax return information is in the public domain, but most people aren't that curious about their neighbors. A law called Allemansrätt (the right of public access) gives everyone the right to roam through private property, for personal recreation. (In the UK, the property rights of landowners are far more sacrosanct.) Swedes are conscious of these traditions, and generally prefer an open, transparent society for the benefits they feel it brings them.
It is also possible that the British, on the whole, have not in fact been in an uproar at the release of Google Street View — just British journalists, some privacy extremists, and the burghers of Broughton village. The journalists and Broughton's villagers fulminated about how burglars would have a field day; the privacy advocates about how 360-panoramic photos of public places often incidentally contain people in them — something which British legal precedent maintains is not an invasion of privacy (reports the BBC).
According to Google, takedown requests for Street View imagery on the first day were "less than expected" (reports the Guardian). Nevertheless, Google in the end felt a potential PR crisis had to be contained, and so brought out the big guns — not just Google Geo head John Hanke, but even Google CEO Eric Schmidt, to state the company's case.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is taking a different tack in producing a competitor to Street View — they'll be crowdsourcing the acquisition of photos, leaving it to us to take them, and then sorting the uploaded pics spatially via their Photosynth technology. In this model, there is no systematic coverage program à la Street View, which is a technology new to most people and which reminds some of the panopticon or 1984's big brother; taking snapshots, however, is something we've all done, and such familiarity is unlikely to create a backlash for Microsoft's plan. The main question is whether crowdsourcing will produce enough usable images: Google tried to crowdsource its 3D buildings layer by making SketchUp free, but Microsoft's own program of systematic 3D city data acquisition so outpaced Google's that Google soon adopted Microsoft's methods.
Egypt lifts its unenforceable ban on GPS
Was it something I did? On April 5, the very day I moved from Egypt to Shanghai, the Egyptian government announced that its blanket ban on GPS devices was over. If I were more paranoid, I'd be taking it personally.
As Egypt's Daily News points out, the only two remaining countries banning GPS device use by citizens are now Syria and North Korea.
It will be interesting to see whether the early adopters of Egyptian iPhones, sold until now without GPS functionality turned on, will be able to get the GPS chip turned on via a firmware or software upgrade. Or else, it really sucks to be a law-abiding early adopter in Egypt.
Cairo-based friend and blogger The Arabist recounts an interesting rumor doing the rounds there as to why this change, now:
Ahmed Ezz, Gamal Mubarak’s right-hand man, imported a luxury vehicle equipped with GPS that customs did not want to release. So he asked his buddy Gamal [son of President Mubarak] to change the regulations.
The Arabist goes on to say he thinks the story is likely apocryphal, but it is telling nonetheless that this kind rumor has legs in Egypt, because many people consider it to be an entirely plausible explanation of how government policy is made.
Wilkins Ice Shelf, RIP
The Wilkins Ice Shelf, on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been breaking up for a while now, and Ogle Earth's been turning satellite images of the remaining ice bridge into KML overlays (see here and here). Now it's finally happened: The ice bridge, too, has disintegrated.
This time, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center has taken the latest MODIS imagery and turned it into a georeferenced time-lapse series for Google Earth. Download it here, and be sure to animate it with the time slider.
Sweden gets an imagery upgrade, but is it censored?
This past weekend's Google Earth imagery update has brought higher resolution imagery to the lower two fifths of Sweden — I'm guessing around 1 meter resolution from looking at the resolution of cars.
The imagery is credited to Lantmäteriet, Sweden's state GIS agency, which previously has been excoriated on this blog for its blatant attempts to camouflage its censorship of "sensitive sites" in its imagery. Until now, Google Earth hasn't used Lantmäteriet's data, opting instead for uncensored Digital Globe tiles on top of 15m resolution base imagery.
Curious as to whether censored Swedish data had found its way into Google Earth, I checked the place that started the original scandal, the headquarters of the the FRA, Sweden's "National Defence Radio Establishment" that had been turned into a fictional forest on national maps. Lantmäteriet's latest imagery of the FRA HQ appears clear and unphotoshopped:
But is it? Looking back through Google Earth's historical archive of imagery, which contains Digital Globe imagery guaranteed to be untouched by Lantmäteriet's censorious instincts, it is easy to toggle the current view with older imagery. Notice how there are two satellite dishes at the north end of the compound, pointing in different directions across the years as they are photographed by passing satellites.
Imagery from August 7, 2007, credited to DigitalGlobe.
But they suddenly go missing in Lantmäteriet's most recent imagery.
Current imagery, credited to Lantmäteriet.
One possibility is that they were dismantled. But look closely, and the area shows inconclusive signs of photoshopping — there is some faint ghosting and repetition, and the tonal gradations don't look as smooth as elsewhere. You wouldn't notice it, unless you were looking for it.
Would Lantmäteriet still do such a thing? Absolutely. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Lantmäteriet's head of security, Michael Munter, back in April 2006, when he explained why it was possible to buy imagery from them that appeared unretouched — the answer being because it was retouched, just more cleverly than before.
In our image there are retouched areas, but not buildings. The secret objects are retouched, but in another way. It isn't often that we retouch buildings.
My suspicion is that those satellite dishes are the kind of "secret objects" he is referring to, and that we've just found a case of such censorship. It should be easy enough to test the theory: Lantmäteriet's source imagery comes from SPOT, IKONOS and QuickBird satellites, which is available via channels other than Lantmäteriet, so it's only a matter of time until a reference image is available for comparison.
I understand (but don't approve of) the fact that some national GIS agencies feel the need to censor imagery before releasing it to the public, even if it's a useless pursuit in a world of multiple international sources for such imagery. What I really object to, however, is the attempts to obfuscate such censorship by adding geographic fictions to imagery. It makes such images less than useless, because not only are they fictional in some places, you don't know where they are fictional, which brings the entire dataset into disrepute. Anything you look at might be fake.
Instead, Lantmäteriet should do like their Dutch counterpart. If they feel compelled to censor, they should pixellate in an obvious way, so you know where the imagery has been degraded and should not be relied upon.
Of course, Lantmäteriet may have mended their ways, and those satellite dishes really have been dismantled, but lingering suspicion is what you get when you've been caught lying about your data once before.
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