- 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)
2 thoughts on “Catch-up: Compare maps in GE; placemarks via email, SMS”
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Stefan:
During GeoDeveloper day we stopped in front of the same Google Earth display with scrolling search requests.
Then the obvious question arose, with the answer being
a) The scroll is not quite real-time
b) And a particular dimension of human curiosity that the Internet has been singularly effective in galvanizing has been filtered out.
And with the current dust-up at AOL, I don’t see it coming to a desktop near us anytime soon.
BT
I was also at building 43 at Google’s Geo Developer Day. I wouldn’t say that that earth model with queries is based in Google Earth’s imagery. I remeber it synchronised with actual time, so it was dark in some regions, yet, you could see activity there as well.