If the The Register can report on dubious self-reported claims of people-spotting in Google Earth, then we here at Ogle Earth are perfectly happy to link to Kiwi horse-spotting stories in Google Earth. Much more charming, that.
(Finding the picture in the Kiwi horse story on Google Earth would make a good puzzle for GoogleEarthing. Previous Register spotting story here. )
A Spanish-language article in the Miami-based El Nuevo Herald, translated into English by Robert at 26th Parallel, identifies yet another collaborative trend made possible by Google Earth: Social spying.
El Nuevo Herald reports on a burgeoning new pastime among some Cuban expats in the US: Finding what they purport to be sensitive or secret information about Castro’s regime in Cuba and then marking these up in Google Earth via the Google Earth Community site.
What’s most interesting here, I think, is not so much the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the sites that are marked and labeled. Rather, it is that the trend exists at all and that it gets a write-up in a local paper.
The ability for anyone to freely publish placemarks to the Google Earth Community, and thus to Google Earth proper via the built-in Google Earth Community layers (both ranked and unranked), will lead to some interesting situations in the long term, I think. There already are the odd naming skirmishes conducted via the multiple placing of placemarks on contested areas (qv. the Falklands). But there could also be political implications if some governments, unschooled in the ways of free speech, decide that Google needs to police what is published on its servers, or face financial consequences.
I guess I was thinking of China:-) Microsoft has already decided to comply with local laws that severely limit free speech. Such conflicts of interest are bound to get more frequent. What happens if somebody starts correctly labelling China’s missile silos in Google Earth?
SketchUp is a 3D authoring tool for both Mac and Windows. A few months ago, a plug-in was released that made it easy for Windows versions of the application to export objects to Google Earth. Now the Mac version is out too.
While the plug-in is only useful to SketchUp users, all Google Earth users can display the exported files. Some of the more impressive examples are available for download at the bottom of the plug-in page. (My favorite: the Acropolis [KML])
[Via Make blog]
The San Francisco Chronicle has an article online on how Google Earth is changing the way environmentalists work. The thesis:
For environmentalists, Google Earth has turned out to be much more than another gee-whiz software development. Instead, it’s starting to look like a killer app that could change the power balance between grassroots environmentalists and their adversaries. […]
The environmental importance of this tool has not been lost on Google. “The power of Google Earth is that it’s not a map. It’s actually a real model of the real Earth,” says Rebecca Moore, a software developer who works on Google Earth. “Suddenly ordinary grassroots environmentalists have a tool that up until now only government agencies or commercial interests had. It’s leveling the playing field.”
The article mentions Moore’s own environmental work, viewable here, Sprol.com, which uses Google Earth to illustrate environmental issues, and the Sierra Club’s ANWR overlays.
There’s only three posts so far, but one of them turns this new Google Earth blog into a must-see. Mart√≠n Cadirola’s Using Google Earth for Earth Science and Remote Sensing exists “to get my fellow colleagues at NASA and other organizations and agencies acquainted with Google Earth and its potential for integrating, visualizing and collaborating information.”
And how. Mart√≠n posts a few “samples of KML files” in this post. The last one, Orbital satellites [KML] contains an orbital snapshot of every satellite I’ve ever heard of, and plenty of other ones too. It looks gorgeous. It’s not live, but it could be, and as such it works well as a lovely piece of eye candy and as proof of concept.
In this post Martín links to a PowerPoint presentation online that he used to introduce Google Earth as part of a pitch by his company to help NASA use the application to visualize their mountains of data. The possibilities he outlines seem broad indeed.
In what looks suspiciously like an act of digital altruism, Digitally Distributed Environments is getting set to single-handedly populate London for us with 3D buildings. Today we get London’s BT Tower. “Larger sections of London should be available shortly,” Andy Smith writes.
Previously: St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Gherkin, Canary Wharf… there is plenty to go looking for.
Nature reporter Declan Butler is interviewed at length by the BBC (audio) about the avian flu virus, and how the web is being used to cover it. Declan’s avian flu network link features prominently.
I had no idea Declan sounds like Alan Cumming.