Uncategorized

Ogle Earth, World Cup edition

5 Comments

You may have noticed the posting frequency has dropped precipitously here on Ogle Earth. That’s because the World Cup has been competing with GIS for my spare time — boy was it difficult to concentrate on GeoTagThings yesterday while England played Sweden. An additional challenge is that I’ve lived for a year or more in eight of the 32 countries partaking, so my frayed national loyalties are making for stressful viewing. I really am not a watcher of spectator sports, but I do allow myself this quadrennial spate of irrational exuberance.

Nevertheless, there is interesting news that touches on Google Earth about, so here’s another post that’s long on links and short on analysis.

  • Development Seed Blog is working on a geocoding module for the Drupal CMS, and is looking for feedback. Support fort Google Earth is of course part of the plan. It’s interesting to see how the module allows for the possibility of multiple placemarks per post. Screenshot 1, 2. (Via Willy Dobbe).
  • Zmarties looks at how Picasa communicates with Google Earth — basically, Picasa acts as a web server to Google Earth, which lets Google Earth send Picasa information via an updating network link. (See? No ActiveX required.)
  • New releases: Version 2.2.0 of Ge-Graph by rsgrillo. KML 2.1 compatible, for Windows, with some very nice looking screenshots. Download here. Mmm, pretty:

    demo1_p.jpg

  • James Fee is such a tease when it comes to ArcGIS Explorer beta screenshots.
  • Interesting tactical move: Microsoft’s Virtual Earth engineers are moving to embrace GeoRSS, probably because it isn’t KML:

    The VE team is very committed to providing great support for GeoRSS, both in our map control for display and data access, as well as tools for publishing your own GeoRSS feeds. Stay tuned for more on that in the future. […] If you’re a developer working with GeoRSS, or a publisher with ideas for tools to make your life easier, we’d love to hear from you.

    So soon we’ll have a situation where Virtual Earth can read and display just GeoRSS, while Google Maps can read and display just KML. I’d love to be able to paste a GeoRSS feed URL into Google Maps and have it display &mfash; it can’t be nearly as hard to do as it was for KML. Why not support both? They’re hardly competing formats.

  • Track your kids live in Google Earth with the GlobalSat TR-101 GPS:

    Basically the TR-101 can send the exact position of your kids by SMS or by GPRS over the internet at any time, but it can also be used as a phone with the possibility to record up to 3 different telephone numbers.

  • Frank at Google Earth Blog has a good way of making your hours spent in front of Google Earth pay: Find new surfing spots for prizes.
  • Map and GIS News Blog for UK, Europe and World hits the radar.
  • Standalone command-line shareware app csv2kml converts CSV files into KML.
  • Leursism finds the first naked person in Google Earth that I am aware of. Either that or an alien.

5 thoughts on “Ogle Earth, World Cup edition”

  1. 1. Talking about the World Cup; favorite player of the geo-hacking community: Landzaat, from the Netherlands.

    2. That naked “being”, the blogger gives no coordinates, but we found it: here, and here.

    3. The previous post, about Geotagthings. It’s an interesting site, and the concept of geotagging things, more interesting even. We’ll leave it for a more detailed discussion.

    ;-)

  2. Of course, the games fall smack in the middle of the work-day: not good for the productivity at The Timoney Group’s world headquarters. Combine that with great NHL and NBA playoffs at night, and let me tell you, matters geospatial fall by the wayside…

    BT

Comments are closed.