• More innovation from Valery using EditGrid’s ability to reference individual cells via a URL: Turn text into a graphic using an online service, and then use it as an overlay in Google Earth. Clever, that.
• Meawhile, Public Beta 11 of EditGrid is out, with last week’s XSL hacks turned into properly documented features.
• Blipstar is an Google Maps-based store locator maker for small businesses. It comes with KML support. (Via CNet)

Interesting news out of China yesterday, picked up by Google Earth Blog, The Map Room, et. al.: China to tighten foreigners’ mapping activities. Reading the tea leaves of Chinese press releases is fun — in this case, though, I think the language is obviously aimed at data gathering within China proper. It would be ludicrous for China to propose its sovereignty suddenly extends into space — this would fly in the face of international treaty and customary law, to which China is bound.

Were in fact China to propose that DigitalGlobe and its competitors not be allowed to collect and/or sell and/or publish satellite images of China, and attempt to impose economic or legal hardships on companies that don’t abide by its bidding, I’m willing to bet China would suddenly find itself at the butt end of reciprocal sanctions from Washington. But since China’s leadership is smart, this scenario won’t happen.

There is another gray area, however, that has nothing to do with satellite imagery: The publishing of what China considers to be military secrets to public forums like Google Earth Community (GEC). I have no idea whether China is worried that publicly available “sensitive” information is made much more accessible via posts to GEC (e.g. the locations and overlays of subterranean submarine tunnels). This information is also available elsewhere on the internet, but those elsewheres aren’t owned by Google. I think this makes Google vulnerable to ploys by Google’s competitors in China. (It wouldn’t be the first time either, as this NYT article from a few months ago pointed out.) Consider this scenario: Citing this new law, and egged on by Baidu, Chinese officials demand of Google’s Chinese subsidiary that specific posts about sensitive Chinese locations be deleted, because it is obvious that the information they contain was gathered on location — and that Google make the identities of several of the posters available to Chinese officials, so that they can be prosecuted should they ever show up in China. Failure of Google to do so would presumably result in Google being blocked in China, fines, or worse.

Continuing steadily along this increasingly speculative path, I’m sure Google would balk at doing a Yahoo! and would instead opt to cease operating in China rather than face the PR fiasco that would accompany the divulging of names.

Google is expanding its philantropic activities in India, writes BusinessWeek. Why mention it here? Google Earth plays a bit part:

Page has volunteered to loan out Google engineers to work with the hospital’s technology team to build a robust IT infrastructure to handle the volume of patient data. He has also offered to train the hospital’s technicians at Google’s offices and provide Google Earth technology to map India’s large blind population.

But the big picture is also interesting: Philantropy is an absolute good, regardless of motive. Nevertheless, should India’s government try to play hardball with Google Earth over Google Earth’s high resolution imagery of India (to which it objects), it will now need to explain to its electorate how a company that is helping India’s 12 million blind is evil exactly, and why preventing access to imagery that is publicly available anyway is more important than alleviating the suffering of its people. (Via the Purple Bubble 2.1)

What a conundrum. You develop a great piece of social software for sharing photos on the web, so good in fact that users spontaneously hack your tagging system to allow the easy addition of georeferencing information via the API and the visualization of these photos on a competitor’s map (via its great API). Other photo sharing sites are beginning to eye built-in georeferencing as a way to compete with you. To remain competitive, would you:

1. Hire the most impressive of these spontaneous geohackers, and give this flourishing geotagging folksonomy an institutional backing? In-house mapping tools would make it extremely intuitive for anyone to georeference photos, but the results would still be compatible with the geotagging standard, so that the effort put into hundreds of thousands of photos is built upon, rather than supplanted.
2. Hire the most impressive of these spontaneous geohackers, and have him build a brand new georeferencing system from scratch? This way, the technology is optimised from the get-go for georeferencing, rather than have to piggyback on tags. For example, it allows for separate privacy settings for photos and their geospatial data. Of course, the geotags on hundreds of thousands of photos on your site will be de facto deprecated, leaving those users with a geotagging “inventory” the choice of continuing with geotags or starting over with the new system…

I myself would have chosen the first option. Flickr clearly chose the latter one. Perhaps all the benefits of option 2 are not yet apparent, but what I hope will happen soon is the following:

• Somebody offers a conversion utility that converts a user’s geotags to the new Yahoo! system. [Flickr has — see comments] Or vice versa, for that matter. (I’m surprised Flickr didn’t do this by default. Geotags are public anyway, and it would have given their new system a running start.)
• Flickr KML Feed and Yuan CC maps are adapted to work with the new Flickr system. I want my Flickr photos in Google Earth, absent Yahoo! Earth.
• Flickr’s georeferencing system gains features quickly to include some of the innovations being made with geotags, such as FlickrFly’s expanded geotag vocabulary.

As an aside, it is interesting to see how Yahoo! and Google have differentiated themselves when it comes to georereferencing photos. Google’s solution is a tie-up between Picasa and Google Earth — both of them standalone applications. Yahoo!, in contrast, relies on two web-based services. Each solution has strong points: For Google, this allows for a far better editing feature set (Picasa) and visualization (Google Earth). For Yahoo!, the integration between Maps and Flickr is far tighter, allowing for such features as batch georeferencing and privacy levels for georeferencing.

PS: I’m traveling again, this time back to Stockholm, and then I’ll be apartment-hunting, so my access to the internet, and hence to this blog, may again be extremely spotty for a while.

• Earthware Blog discovers a very nice Google Earth comparative mapping utility: Turn on this network link, and you get crosshairs in the center of your screen with links to that location in Google Maps, Windows Live Local (and Yahoo! Local, though this latter link is broken, currently.) While you’re at it, check out Earthware Blog’s first georeferencing project: UK Cinema Film Times in Google Earth, updated daily.
• Geography 2.0‘s Alan Glennon concocts a proof of concept whereby you email placemarks to a content management system and then have them appear automatically in Google Earth via a network link. To do this, Alan assembled basic off-the-shelf web technologies — a service that allow you to post to blogs by email, Blogger, and a regularly executed PHP script that constructs a KML file. Here is the blog, here is the KML file, and here is Alan’s page explaining the project.

  Almost simultaneously, disaster relief project Strong Angel III has been experimenting with converting SMS messages into collaborative georeferenced news, especially in the context of a major disaster. Here too, users are asked to identify where they are before sending news; with mobile phones, however, technologies are in place that will soon make that step unnecessary — triangulating mobile phone signals from different towers could be used for positioning. It’s not implausible that you will soon be able to SMS emergency news to a number, say, 911, and have this pop up on a universally accessible map. The main challenge, as I see it: pranksters playing with pay-as-you phones.

• InformationWeek begins its (very interesting) article on Google thus:
  

  In Building 43 at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters is a video screen that depicts the world as seen in Google Earth. Across a revolving globe, streams of colorful pixels, like sparks from a Roman candle, mark the geographic origin of queries coming in to Google’s search engine. It’s a real-time representation of Google as the nexus of human curiosity.

  Boy would I love to see that on my desktop.

• A module for Drupal that adds KML georeferencing to posts is as good as ready over here.
• GIS authoring application Manifold is no longer encouraging users to appropriate Google Maps tiles via its software, citing Google’s intention of enforcing its licensing constraints. (Via The Earth is Square)

Congratulations NASA World Wind development team — you have just logged your very first official complaint regarding your app’s country borders:

APA’s Europe bureau reports the regional map presented by NASA, which has created analogue of Google Earth program on www.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov, shows Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as territory of Armenia. This mistake was not in the Google Earth program. Taking into account that NASA is a state agency, this is a quite a serious mistake.

This must amount to something like coming of age for a mapping application — having one’s data offend far-away nationalists with chips on their shoulders.

Burning Man — running from August 28 to September 4, is located a few kilometers north of last year’s edition, in northwest Nevada. This year, a subsite is dedicated to bringing Burning Man to Google Earth — Burning Man Earth.

Currently, the main network link either doesn’t work or isn’t running yet, but already there is some fine content there, such as georeferenced events and SketchUp models. Boing Boing has also been posting a map and GPX data. What I haven’t found to date is a comprehensive map overlay with event data as a network link, so I made one.

I converted the GPX data to KML. I then took this PDF map and coverted its components to transparent overlays, aligned with the GPX data. I then took Burning Man Earth’s events file and wrapped a network link around it. You can download the whole thing here. Wish I was there.

If you want an even wider perspective, check out this post on Google Earth Community.