What a difference high production values can make to a weather map in Google Earth. Trond Michelsen of the Norwegian Meteorogical Institute has turned NMI’s forecasts into a remarkable network link. It comes with cute-as-a-button icons, color-coded temperatures (which I really like — check northern Norway) and — the pièce de resistance — it’s all time-enabled. Icons change from suns during the day to moons at night, you can click them for more local info, and if you turn on the preciptiation overlays, you’ll see that cloud layers there match the icons. It just looks so professional. Almost makes one want to live in Norway:-)

Trond wrote in with some of the technical details, below the fold.

Continue reading Time-enabled Norwegian weather forecasts →

As suspected, Google Earth merely features as video footage inside the new Google Video ads for the Saturn car make, but it’s actually cleverly done. Google Earth in effect becomes a cheap special effects machine for the video ads, making it easy to churn out 22 different ads featuring different Saturn dealers, and then showing the one for the dealer nearest to the user, as determined by the IP address. That’s definitely something new.

Hashem Bajwa of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the ad agency that created the ads, wrote in with more info, below the fold.

Continue reading Google Earth features in Saturn video ads →

• Hot on the heels of a KML module for the Drupal content management system, Dan Karran has now released a GeoRSS module. End result: You can suck in GeoRSS feeds into Drupal and show them as KML. (Via GeoRSS blog)
• Now that time is supported in Google Earth, Adam Burt has added time stamp data to the Blojsom CMS template he uses to output his blog as KML. Here’s a screencast of how it works. (Via Bedeviled Mojo Slop)
• Brian Flood demonstrates how the timeline works with overlays of Hurricane Katrina, and promises much tighter integration with ArcGIS coming up. Gorgeous.
• Valery Hronusov updates his existing bird migration data to take advantage of the timeline, putting the whole thing into EditGrid in the process.
• Digitally Distributed Environments is exploring ways to use SketchUp to rapidly apply photographic textures to sides of buildings.
• Google is helping Saturn to advertise their cars via the web in several US test markets, and apparently it involves Google Earth, reports the New York Times. It’s not clear how, but to me it sounds like they’re merely showing Google Earth footage inside a Flash banner ad. And that’s not anything to get excited about. (
  Uncategorized

  DIY high-altitude ballooning

  September 24, 2006 Stefan Geens 2 Comments

  Genius! Not a mile from where I worked this summer, Cambridge University students earlier this month launched Nova 1, a meteorogical balloon juryrigged with a digital camera, GPS, mobile phone and radio transmitter. The thing went 32 km straight up and took 857 photos at 15-second intervals, some of which show some clear curves. it returned to Earth via parachute, landing 45 km due East a little under three hours later.

  They’ve turned the positioning data into KML, though their link is a bit iffy. Here is a proper network link for it. The result looks like this:

  

  What I’d really love to see is a time-enabled path with screen overlays for all 857 photos. It’d be trivial to do. I can’t wait for Nova 2.

The following is not really Google Earth related, but it does have that Belgian angle…

Google has now posted the Belgian court’s judgement in full (Google’s English translation — ooh the irony) on google.be, as instructed. The effect is comical:

I went to the trouble of reading it (it’s okay, I also went on a long walk through late summer Swedish forests for balance) and just want to highlight the crux of the judgement, which happens to be unintentionally funny:

Investigations showed that when an article is available on the site of the Belgian newspaper, Google sends you there directly, using deep links, but that, as soon as this article is no longer present on the paper’s site, it is possible to obtain the contents via a link to a version that Google has recorded in its “cache”, which is in the gigantic database that Google maintains in its enormous server farm [yes, singular].

(“Attendu que ces recherches l’ont notamment conduit à mettre en évidence que, lorsqu’un article est toujours en ligne sur le site de l’éditeur belge, Google renvoie directement, via le mécanisme d’hyperliens profonds, vers la page ou se trouve l’article mais que, dès que cet article n’est plus présent sur le site de l’éditeur de presse belge, il est possible d’en obtenir le contenu via l’hyperlien « en cache » qui renvoie vers le contenu de l’article que Google a enregistré dans la mémoire « cache » qui se trouve dans la gigantesque base de données que Google maintient dans son énorme parc de serveurs;”)

I love the last bit; makes you wonder if the the judgment had been different if the server farms were smaller or the database merely “large”. (And the judgement also twice prints Google’s address as “1600 Amfitheater Park Way” — don’t these lawyers know English? :-)

As for the merits of the above argument, it seems to turn on the fact that Belgian francophone newspapers want to make money off their archives, and that Google is seen to prevent them from doing this by offering a free cached version. Google’s defence was that anyone can request that they not be cached (I’m guessing via a server’s robots.txt file) but the Belgian francophone papers are arguing that the default stance should be no caching, and that Google should ask for permission before it shows cached content. In other words, it’s about who should be going through the trouble of asking.

Of course, Google without its cache would be much less of an institution, so I understand why they are fighting this; should the idea of requiring permission for serving cached copyrighted material gain currency, it could spell trouble for Google, though not just for them — the wholesale caching of content (copyrighted and not, by a great many companies, including European ones) is a cornerstone of the web as we know it. The Belgian ruling states that Google serving cached content copyrighted by the plaintiffs without prior permission is illegal. The danger is that in its zeal to teach Google a lesson, the court may have now also put a chink in that which makes the world wide web such a compelling technology.

So we already know Belgium’s military is pissed at Google Earth for the ease with which it makes detailed aerial imagery of Belgium available. (Here is the original article by the Belga news agency that was the source of the television news broadcast blogged yesterday.) The question is, what can they do about it?

According to Belgeoblog, they’re getting support from at least some politicians and business interests. One Belgian senator on the intelligence oversight committee has promised a report on the matter by the end of September, and she wants to draw up a list of sensitive sites, much as the Netherlands has. One security industry representative says that companies which own nuclear power plants are especially unhappy about the images:

They do everything to keep such sensitive information secret and suddenly it’s made public, without an opportunity for them to defend themselves.

That quote either betrays massive ignorance or willful subterfuge — such imagery has long been public, and if they’ve been operating their plants under the mistaken assumption that nobody ever flies overhead, then perhaps there should be an oversight committee report on that.

But, again, what could Belgian legislators do? One possible scenario (if this doesn’t fizzle out) is a new censorship law that will compel aerial imaging companies operating in Belgium to submit freshly gathered data for censorship against a list of sensitive sites (again, like in the Netherlands). If so, let’s hope Google purchases imagery of Belgium before such a law come into effect — and we’d have a textbook case of legislators closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. Another option: Google could in the future choose to purchase satellite imagery instead — no country has jurisdiction in space.

But considering the cavalier attitude of Belgian courts regarding what you can and cannot do on the Belgian internet when linking to news if you’re Google, it’s not entirely inconceivable that they might try to get Google to censor imagery that is already being served via Google Earth, retroactively as it were, threatening various legal repercussions if Google does not comply. Although no country has taken such a step, not India, not China, not Russia, how ironic would it be if Belgium were to try?

• Google Maps’ API has changed slightly. If you want to link to the KML version of a Google Map location, you now need to add an “@” before the latitude, like this:

  http://maps.google.com/maps?q=@48.89,2.36&output=kml

  (Via Google Earth Community)

• Avi Bar-Ze’ev begins a mammoth 9-part exploration of the coming 3D web, (or Web 3D, as he calls it, not to be confused with 3pointD:-). In part one today, some history: Why the precursor to Google Earth wasn’t a browser plugin.
• SketchUp models can now be “published to the web” with the Hypercosm Teleporter for SketchUp Pro, as per this press release. The idea is that you can then view SketchUp models in 3D from within the browser, using a browser plugin, the Hypercosm Player. Problem is, the plugin is only available in Windows, which rather defeats the entire purpose of building a browser plugin, no?
• Google Earth developers are among the winners of this year’s San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation awards for their work as part of the Global Connection Project Team, “developing software tools for use with Google Earth to help disaster responders get accurate and timely information during recovery efforts.” Nobody tell the World Wind guys. (Via SFGate)
• For Mac users, Brian Thoth’s Google Maps Plugin for the Address Book is now at version 2.6, featuring improved Google Earth support.
• Looking for naked people in Google Earth is by now an established sport, but this is new: Possibly finding one in the Netherlands, and then having Dutch TV racing to the scene to try to identify the person. (No luck, though).
• Log2GoogleEarth visualizes live traffic to a website in Google Earth. I haven’t tested this myself but the screenshot looks interesting.
• Gorgeous: Digitally Distributed Environments shows us how to make pixel art in SketchUp.
• IMVU, a 3D chat application for PCs, can now import SketchUp content. Good question: Where is the SketchUp model importer for Second life? (Via 3pointD)