Wikimapia has been an runaway success — it even has a blog dedicated to it, Matt’s Wikimapia Blog. Matt reports that all of WikiMapia’s content is now available as a KML network link. It’s fast, unobtrusive, and works exactly as advertised — making it yet another great source of user-generated geospatial annotation. (Via my comments:-)
Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) has just published detailed new global geospatial poverty data, and Declan Butler has turned a subset of them to KML overlays. He’s made a global hunger map, a global infant mortality map, and a detailed poverty map of Palestine, downloadable from his blog. Declan points out that “the underlying GIS data made freely available by CIESIN allows any GIS professional to build upon them by integrating other data.” This should make the eradication of global poverty just a little easier.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.