• Real Time Rome is MIT SENSEable City Lab‘s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, and is due to launch in a few days. It looks very very cool, and Google is listed as a partner, though it’s not clear yet how or if Google Earth will be used as the client. Information Week has an article about the project. (And I wish I had more time for this and less for apartment hunting.)
• Linux users: Geotag your photos with Google Earth and libferris, “virtual filesystem with index and search capabilities that allows you to geotag files.” Here’s how, on Linux.com.
• Okay, a little bird told me that CBS news wasn’t necessarily first to publish its news as KML. Australia’s ABC News has also had its stories georeferenced on Earth and Maps, albeit experimentally and without publicizing it. While we’re on the topic, however, remember that third-party efforts had the BBC news georeferenced over a year ago…
• World Wind Classroom is a website dedicated to, well, using NASA World Wind in the classroom. (Via The Earth is Square)
• Brian Timoney has an interesting story from the GIS trenches, which he’s posted as a comment on All Points Blog. It begins:
  

  While it certainly would be in my best interest for GE to be ‘the next cool thing’ in IT, my sense is that it’s not going to happen anytime soon given the current licensing for its use in professional environments.

CBS news is making a concerted effort to be accessible via a number of ways and devices, now including as KML. While georeferencing news isn’t a new idea, it’s the first proper implementation by mainstream media I’ve seen. (I’m assuming the georeferencing is done properly, rather than via hit-or-miss after-the-fact geocoding, and so far it looks like it is.)

But why-oh-why stop in the home stretch — the purveyed KML file is not a network link (instead we are asked to “just add the link below” to Google Earth) and if you do click on the file, the server isn’t configured properly, so you get KML code displayed in the browser, rather than a file that the browser knows to download. This mantra about network links has been repeated far too often here and elsewhere for pro sites to still strike out like that. That’s enough sports analogies though.

• Dan Karran’s KML module for the Drupal content management system is out. Some very pleasant surprises: You can get KML files containing posts (“nodes”) tagged with a particular term, and also KML for search results containing geospatial data… and you can order the content, to facilitate flythroughs. There’s more. Get it here.
• For the Mac, OSXplanet hits version 1.0. It’s a free, impressive screensaver of Earth (and other bodies in the solar system), with overlays for weather, satellites, earthquakes and volcanoes. All by a 17-year old Gabriel Otte.
• I didn’t know this. You can google “terrain of belgium” and get a direct answer back from the CIA Factbook as a first response. Google has other such geographic search shortcuts, as listed by Google Blogoscoped. Cool, but this just begets the question: Why stop there with the integration? Where is the KML overlay? Wouldn’t the best way to deliver geographic information from a Google search usually be via Google Earth or Maps?
• Valery Hronusov has a revamped start page up that aggregates and categorizes many of the GIS and Google Earth-related projects that are on Google Earth Community, and elsewhere.
• Display watch: A 32-inch 3D-ish monitor, as reviewed by The Register. (Via WorldCAD Access)
• WorldWind reaches 10 million downloads on SourceForge.
• Morocco’s ISPs’ problems with Google Earth are still not resolved, according to this user.
• Mmm, Principal Groundwater Aquifers of the United States (at Topographic Map Archive, where there is a lot more great stuff.)
• Not previously noticed on my radar: Hawkeye ($70) for Microsoft MapPoint syncs your view in MapPoint with the same view in Google Earth (and Virtual Earth).
• Cool: the Nantucket Sound Ferry Scientific Environmental Monitoring System provides live positioning data and environmental data, as a network link too, of course. (Via this LiveJournal post)
• Google Earth, art instrument to Janice Caswell, currently showing in New York.
• Earthbrowser‘s Matt Giger has a swipe at Google Earth, faulting it for an aging codebase and a kludgy API (the KML file format) and adds:
  

  EarthBrowser (as primitive as it was) had the virtual globe market all to itself from 1998 to about 2002 when I first heard about Keyhole EarthViewer when someone from Keyhole offered to buy earthbrowser.com and my customer list.

  Matt also promises that the next version of EarthBrowser will have a “fully scriptable game engine”. I’d be interested to know Matt’s opinion of NASA World Wind as a competitor.

• Valery Hronusov’s EditGrid-based path calculator with output as KML uses all of the latest EditGrid XSL features. Where is Google Spreadsheets? What is the point of collecting disparate technologies under one roof if you don’t get any benefits from it? Meanwhile, EditGrid adds RSS feeds for new spreadsheets, etc…
• Interesting idea: “I am just testing an AppleScript from Adam Burt which takes a screenshot of google earth and posts it to a blog via ecto. Does lots of tagging and produces metadata too.” It’s for the Blojsom CMS.
• Another GPS-to-Google-Earth tool: GPS2GoogleEarth ($20) for PocketPC.
• Photo georeferencing tool RoboGEO is up to 4.4 ($35). It now supports Flickr’s new API.

[Update 08:59 UTC: One more thing: The British Airways layer that is getting so much press attention and its own TV commercial doesn’t work (for me) if I use the Mac version of Google Earth v4 beta. Specifically, the “price clouds” are white rectangles rather than transparent numbers. Yes, it’s beta, but I wouldn’t encourage a mainstream company to use cutting edge versions of software if it means that a significant portion of its users won’t get what’s intended.]

I’ll be living the idyllic life on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago for the next week or so while I hunt for an apartment in town. Due to a lack of easy access to the internet there, a pictoresque but longish daily commute by boat to work, and the apartment hunting effort, Google Earth coverage will necessarily be restricted. In other words, expect more abbreviated news like this:

• Mark Zeman’s FlickrMap becomes Trippermap, still looks gorgeous, and now uses Flickr’s new geotagging API to let you tag Flickr photos in Google Earth directly. Yuan.CC Maps has also upgraded to the new Flickr API. There is now every reason to convert one’s old geotags into the new system (using Flickr’s import tool.)
• Declan Butler posts that he interviews NASA World Wind’s Patrick Hogan in the latest issue of Nature. Next up for Earth’s dataset: Lighting and shading.
• TechWorld: WiFi network planner uses Google Earth
• Interesting press release: “Farallon Geographics built a web-based interface using a free Oracle Express database and a free Google Earth interface to assist 2 San Francisco Bay Area Geological Hazard Abatement Districts manage risks related to property damage from potential landslides and other disasters.”
• How does Google Earth keep track of all that data it serves? With its home-grown “Bigtable” database. Read all about it.
• A new version of Arc2Earth is out. Brian Flood explains what’s new. (Via GIS User)
• Documenting Picasa, an even niche-ier blog than this one, notes that Google has registered googleimagetagger.com, and speculates as to what it could mean.
• Chris Holmes writes up his GeoServer Tech Talk at the Googleplex, now available on video.

As reported in Forbes, British Airways does some marketing with Google Earth — or is it the other way round?:-)

There’s two parts to this campaign: On BA’s website, a Google Earth layer that shows prices for different destinations; and a lovely television commercial by BA for the UK market that features Google earth (via Kreativt Forum.) Here is the video.

While BA’s layer is not the most efficient way to book flights if you know where you want to go, it is undeniably an entertaining way to plan serendipitously. And the overlay also uses KML interestingly, in that rolling over an icon switches it to another image. (The KML tags involved are StyleMap, Pair, Key and StyleURL — copy a placemark in Google Earth and paste it into a text editor to see the syntax at work.)