GeoMapLookup, a very slick web 2.0-ish geolocator for IP addresses, has now added a link to Google Earth for every result. A nice touch: having the link in the popup. A very nice touch: Each IP lookup gets its own permalink. Me, I’m blogging this from here right now (and here is the permalink for the KML).
One possible use of all this permalinking goodness: Tweaking the templates in your CMS to show where commenters are coming from: Here’s how to do it for WordPress. (Via Cinnamon thoughts)
India’s The Economic Times revisits the ongoing saga regarding spots on Google Earth that the Indian government would like to see censored.
The short version: “We have not yet decided whether or not to blur some key sites,” according to Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s head of Global Public Policy (is that title a first for a company? How do you get that job?:-)
The longer version — says McLaughlin:
We take security concerns seriously but obscuring images will not help. We have never degraded image quality… The images available on Google Earth are also available for purchase from various satellite companies in market. The government needs to deal with this issue at the level of satellite companies because they are selling images to us… mapping services etc are available commercially… sometimes free of cost and sometimes for a price. If images damage security then they need to talk to satellite companies. Blurring needs to be done by satellite companies… targeting Google Earth will not fix the problem.
All true, but it does bear repeating that while technically “We have never degraded image quality” is not the same as replacing existing DigitalGlobe tiles wholesale with older versions (which is what was done in Iraq), the effect is certainly the same. Older is worse.
Finally, the article also reminds us of Indian President A P J Abdul Kalam’s call in April 2006 for “a new law to prevent foreign satellites from getting images of sensitive locations in India and make such attempts a cognizable offense,” despite the fact that country sovereignty does not extend into space, where these satellites are.
My personal opinion is the 3D has issues with being an ActiveX control that runs on Windows and IE only, it is not really web.
In fact as a developer, if I know I am only targeting the Windows platform then a browser is not going to provide the richest user experience. I would be better off building a Windows application.
It’s ironic (just a little) that Google, meanwhile, has a standalone application, though for three different platforms.
Last week Frank Taylor linked to Barry Hunter’s Google Earth client version stats for the KML content that gets delivered from his server at nearby.co.uk.
Analysing the last week’s figures leads to some surprises — for example, take a look at the relative size of the different platforms: Linux has about 5% of all queries, Mac 19.5%, with Windows the rest. That is a much larger proportion of people using Mac and Linux versions of the client than what you find for generic web browsers on most web sites.
I can think of a couple of reasons why: There are more Macs at home, where people do their surfing, than at the office, where network administrators likely do not allow installations of Google Earth Free. Also, the average Mac tends to be newer and have a better graphics card, making Google Earth a more viable proposition. And Macs are popular in education, where Google Earth is a hit.
Looking at the figures for Google Earth Pro, just under 20% of all uses are with a Pro client. (Of course, this proportion is heavily dependent on the type of content available on a server.)
Finally, it looks like only about 4% of users are still using Google Earth version 3, though visitors to Nearby.co.uk are most likely to be savvy users, and such users tend to be aggressive updaters.
Conclusions? These, I think:
Talking of PC-only contents, why is it that the Berlin network link still doesn’t work on a Mac after almost two weeks? Weren’t they going to fix that? [Update: Um, it seems to be working for some people on their Macs, though not others. Feedback is welcome.]
(Caveat: The above analysis is just an interpolation from one server’s results. If anyone else has such stats, I’d love to hear if they are similar.)
It’s been a bit quiet the past couple of days here on Ogle Earth, for two good reasons.
Slated for a session at the Association of American Geographers‘ 2007 Annual meeting in San Francisco this coming April 17-21:
Beyond Apollo and Adorno: Dionysus and Walter Benjamin on Google Earth
Any talk that manages to mention my philosophical hero Friedrich Nietzsche and Ogle Earth in the same abstract gets a mention on this blog. That’s a new rule. (I do apologize if the Dionysian title of this blog belies its Apollinian tilt — there are very few pointers to naked sunbathers here, alas.)
Now, if anybody manages to mention my other philosophical hero Baruch Spinoza and Ogle Earth in the same abstract, I don’t know what I’d do. (Thanks Brian Timoney!)
Just when I thought I was in danger of becoming a jaded customer of the mass mapping space, here’s a site that effortlessly returns me to a state of slack-jawed wonder: HeyWhatsThat.
What’s that, HeyWhatsThat? it’s an automatic summit-perspective generator for any peak in the continental US. You can request the view from any mountain top, and HeyWhatsThat will use a database of summits and a DEM to show you what the view looks like from there, and annotate it for you.
But that’s just the beginning. You can click anywhere on the horizon of the generated view to see its corresponding spot on Google Maps. Then, click on “show profile” to show the elevation of the path from the summit to that point. You can turn on a “visibility” cloak in Google Maps which paints red all those areas that are visible from your perspective. And you can also turn on contours on Google Maps.
Then, click on the Google Earth link for a head trip. You get a network link showing all public panoramas. Turn one on, and you get an automatically generated overlay showing all visible areas from that summit in red, and an overlay showing the extent of your horizon. If you think this is too good to be true, as I did, just zoom on in onto the summit, and have a look around — everything is in red, just as it should be from that perspective.
If you request your own panorama, the options are very well thought out. For example, when you choose a location on the map, you get given the opportunity to move to the highest nearby spot, so that you don’t accidentally get a generated view from just below the summit. Very nice.
One of the developers, Michael Kosowsky, writes that they’re working on making HeyWhatsThat work globally. As for browser compatibility: “The web site has been developed against Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, and seems to run reasonably well with Internet Explorer 7. Other browsers may have problems.”
if this doesn’t unleash the inner geeky-nature-lover in you, nothing will:-)