In a follow-up to yesterday’s news on Thailand’s upcoming public satellite imagery database, an article in the Bangkok Post quotes somebody from the project as saying that “Digital Thailand would blot out security-sensitive areas.”

It will be fun using Google Earth to find out which sites Thailand considers sensitive. (Via All Points Blog.)

Laurent of lastingnews.com points to an interesting article in the Hindustan Times, Ganging up against Google, about the expert group the Indian government has convened to see if and how it should try to pressure Google into degrading the resolution of imagery of India in Google Earth.

What’s interesting is that the article gets two opposing points of view on the matter. One person, the surveyor-general of India, Major-General Gopal Rao, seems to believe what he reads in India’s more jingoistic press:

Rao told the Hindustan Times that the government could ask the US-headquartered company to reduce the resolution of images of sensitive locations or even blur the details. “This is something that’s technically feasible, something that Google has done for the US government,” said Rao.

Google has never reduced the resolution of Google Earth images, not “for the US government” nor for anyone else, and media reports that this is the case are due to the fact that reporters do not understand how Google Earth acquires its data. Every update of the data has brought increases in resolution, not reductions.

The other interviewed person is far more sanguine and aware of the broader issues, it appears:

V.S. Ramamurthy, secretary, Science and Technology Department, was non-committal. He said the expert group would look into all related issues. […] “The group will also study what other countries have done,” said Ramamurthy.

And if the group does that, it will see that other countries have done precisely nothing — not Australia, not the Netherlands, not the US, not Israel, not Korea, not China (as per this comment), not Pakistan, not Thailand and not Russia.

In what is quite an auspicious start to 2006 for wonderful things being done with Google Earth, Germany’s Bernhard Sterzbach today came out with a beta of his Globe Glider, which brings the holy grail of integrating Google Earth with the web browser a whole lot closer.

Globe Glider is a dynamic network link, but on steroids. Its main innovation is much tighter integration between Google Earth and its built-in browser — installation requires you to allow Google Earth to be scriptable, a setting that gets changed in the Windows registry (see setup instructions).

Once Globe Glider is up and running, the browser window shows all manner of relevant information about the current view in Google Earth, and it updates automatically. (I got some errors, but that’s probably because I don’t have ActiveX installed, as I used Virtual PC for the Mac to check this).

I especially like the built-in GeoURL tab, which updates to show you nearby GeoURL entries in the browser. Same goes for a list of links to nearby places, with Google Earth’s view moving to these places if you click on the links. We have two-way communication between browser and Earth, then, and that’s a wonderful thing to see. (Other tabs point to Answers.com, destination guides and also nearby hotels, so there looks to be a referral-based business model behind all this.)

The Nation, “Bangkok’s independent newspaper”, reports that Thailand will offer satellite imagery of Thailand starting in February, both via CDs and via the web. The project is called Digital Thailand, the paper reports.

As for the rest of the article… Can you spot the bloopers? I can see at least three different ones.

He said the Web-based version, which is for organizations use, will have more details as it will allow users to zoom in to about one metre above the object. The CD-ROM-version, which will be distributed free to the people, will allow users to zoom in to about 15 metres above objects.

Phaisal said Digital Thailand would be similar to Google Earth service but it will be free of charge.

The service has been developed using Nasa’s Whirlwind engine, he said.

While the initiative sounds commendable, there are a few things I don’t understand: Is everybody getting a CD-ROM in the mail? wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper and more up-to-date to just deliver this via the web, even if it’s via a Maps-like application? And why are “the people” stuck with 15-meter resolution imagery? Is it really just a cost issue? A cursory check of Google Earth’s offerings in Thailand suggests that in many places it has better than 1-meter resolution. At least Google Earth will be around to keep the Digital Thailand project honest should authorities decide to censor.

Final thought: Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper and more democratic just to donate the 1-meter resolution imagery to Google (and NASA World Wind and WW2D) so that everyone can view it?