Live, from Napa Valley:

• Adena Shutzberg reports from the New York State Geospatial Summit that Google Earth CTO Michael Jones previewed a feature that links locations in Google Earth to locations in Google’s scanned books. Google Earth’s timeline functionality lets you surf through the publication date of the books, and there appears to be a clever system for avoiding clutter, reports Adena.
• Mickey Mellen, Google Earth game pioneer with GEWar and founder of Google Earth Hacks, announces a new game: Google Earth Football:
  

  I’m pretty sure this is the first app for Google Earth to take custom user feedback directly from within Google Earth without using the COM API or the built-in web browser. The other game we made (GEwar, a while back) relied heavily on the browser. This game runs 100% within Google Earth. If you know of other apps that do this, please let me know.

• Mickey has also started a new blog, Digital Earth Blog. Why?
  

  After coming back from Where 2.0 and the Google Developer Day, I thought I’d probably have a lot to say about a variety of earth products so I started that blog. It’ll be a lot lighter on the GE stuff than you or Frank, but hopefully covering more detail about Virtual Earth, Google Maps, World Wind, etc.

• The Times of India manages to milk the story about New York state lawmaker Michael Gianaris calling for censorhip of Google’s satellite imagery.
• TierraWiki gets a major overhaul. Writes Tim Park:
  

  The major addition with this release is that we have kicked off building a digital trail database with corresponding network links into Google Earth (and Google Maps on the site). This builds on the track statistics that we had previously had by combining GPS data from the same trail to refine the internal model of the trail and provide a range of times that it has taken different trail users to complete a trail to make planning outdoor trips easier.

  This page explains how trail info is processed, which is then accessible via a KML network link covering all trails. Here is a page showing a single trail.

Two articles of note in today’s media:

• The San Francisco Chronicle reports on how Google Earth is providing indigenous people in the Amazon basin with satellite imagery to help them monitor illegal logging and mining on their reserve lands. A fascinating read.
• New York City’s NY1 television news channel reports on New York State Assemblyman Michael Gianaris’s call to censor Google imagery in the aftermath of the foiled JFK attack plan. The report also asks 4 random New Yorkers for their reaction to Gianaris’s call, and their responses make me proud to be a New Yorker: Pretty much every reason why Gianaris’s call is a bad idea is brought up by them. Watch the video for yourself.

• Do Google and Microsoft have an automtic right to virtualize real buildings? The Church of England thinks Sony certainly doesn’t. I think Sony does.
• At the bottom of this page on the Polar View website is a KML file containing every single Antarctic base out there. It’s great for finding even the best hidden bases — some of the brand-new high resolution tiles in Google Earth that look completely devoid of human habitation actually do contain a base upon closer inspection. Happy hunting.
• GIS pro Steve0 likes GeoCommons. GIS pro James Fee doesn’t. Lively debate ensues. My take: Neogeography is here to stay. Make room for it. Dave Bouwman puts it better.
• In February 2007, a Sudanese gun-running plane crashed at El-Geneina airport. The Register carries a breathless story about how you can see the plane on Google Earth. The only problem? Turning on the Digital Globe metadata layer shows that the imagery of the airport was taken in February 2006.
• Google and the JFK Bomb Plot: The Censorship Circus (Lauren Weinstein’s Blog):
  

  Calls for massive imagery censorship, presumably to blot out every conceivable terrorist target from the public’s online view, have a certain appeal among those who always view the Internet and most of its users with suspicion. The logical outcome of this reasoning could vastly alter Google’s imagery data storage requirements — removing enough photos to make the lords of censorship happy would reduce the Google Earth file system to something akin to a single “404 Not Found” page.

• Cato Institute’s John Harper at the National Review (!):

  Google “Get a Life”: Ignore the roar of the JFK plotters.

  Better to concede the point: Terrorists can get the same access to payment systems, health care, shoe stores, knives, computers, photography equipment, and vitamin supplements as everyone else. Google Earth, too.

  More where that came from.

• ESRI ArcGIS Explorer gets a blog. I’d subscribe, but it doesn’t have an RSS feed.
• Extremely cool: Barnabu.co.uk uses SketchUp’s accurate daylight shadow feature to create a ground overlay for his dynamic London Eye that matches the position of the ferris wheel:

  

• Only tangentially related to virtual globes, but: What glorious visualization! (Via Pruned)

A LiveScience article relates how satellite imagery is being used in Egypt to find promising new sites to excavate. Egyptology Blog locates one place mentioned in the article (here it is in Google Maps) — a settlement from 400 AD on top of a much older temple dedicated to Akhenaten, the pharaoh who came up with monotheism and moved his capital to modern-day Amarna, just to the north of the site.

Turn on the National Geographic layer in Google Earth to see links to an article from 2001 about the region. And if you turn on the Google Earth Community layer — an unparalleled repository of raw geographical annotation — you’l find this link to an overlay of the region.

(I’m pretty sure that the settlement featured in the article was already discovered and excavated, so this is not a case of looking at Google’s own Digital Globe imagery and going “what, you didn’t know that was there??” But it certainly takes an archaeologist familiar with the region to know what’s been documented and what hasn’t.)

One thing is certain: These “tells” aren’t time sensitive, so the sudden abundance of cheap high resolution imagery, even if it’s 18 months old, has made satellite-based archaeological discovery much cheaper and accessible.

Previous articles in this vein:

Google helps discover Roman villa

Archaeologists dig Google Earth

Google Earth craterfest: New craters look promising

Two related announcements of note: 1) The pioneering and Google Earth-featured Gombe Chimp Blog gets a major upgrade (including a design revamp and a change of address), and now uses 2) Earthwatchr, a new open-source geosavvy content management backend that uses Google Maps to georeference posts and which outputs content both as HTML with ready-made Google Maps and as KML.

Earthwatchr beta source code will be available July 15, 2007, according to the site. Bryce Tugwell and Nick Novitski are the people behind this. Nick blogs his involvement in the development of Earthwatchr on That Bright Instrument, highlighting some of the cool features:

If you go to the [Gombe Chimp Blog], you can see Earthwatchr integrates google maps, google earth, and your website into a single experience. Please feel free to try out the geo-referenced comment feature: Replies and comments that possess spatial information, just like the posts themselves

Bryce let me have a look at the CMS: Here’s how you georeference the post — you can even add a path:

There are also options for defining the view in Google Earth. Here’s some of them:

Earthwatchr is written in ASP, but Bryce writes in an email:

We will be posting a forum for users to post questions suggestions and new versions, perhaps some other users will decide to jump in and start a PHP version.

There are a couple of other geosavvy CMSes out there, but Earthwatchr is the only one I am aware of that uses Google Maps in the back-end to georeference posts. I’m guessing most mainstream blog CMSes will have this feature in a couple of years. What I’m also looking forward to is GeoRSS support.

I played hooky on some of the ISDE5 conference proceedings, only to find a pretty green One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computer sitting all by itself in a conference room, which drew me to it like a moth to a flame. It turns out that an ISDE volunteer, Ed Cherlin, had one on loan from Google to show off to people here. I was smitten.

What did I end up doing with it? Check today’s web mapping tools for compatibility with the OLPC browser, obviously. How did they fare?

Google Maps passed with flying colors. It looked just like how it looks on my Firefox:

Microsoft Virtual Earth? Not so much. It wasn’t possible to get it to show a map, though I was welcome to search as much as I wanted:

Yahoo! Maps? The new beta didn’t manage to show a map, but presumably that’s why they call it a beta:

The classic Yahoo! Maps worked without a hitch:

The upshot? Even if you can’t get Google Earth on the OLPC, you will definitely be able to visualize KML files, as you can load these up via Google Maps. Good to see, too, that Google has OLPCs to play with, test for compatibility and loan out to conferences to help evangelize these. Are there OLPCs on Microsoft’s and Yahoo!’s campuses?

• The Google Sightseeing blog notices that Google’s latest update now has imagery of Beirut that shows the aftermath of last summer’s war. The post also mentions how this data was intended for inclusion then, but I think that in the end, the nature of the material simply proved too controversial and simply could not be presented neutrally while such a war was still raging.
• Google Earth’s site has a new page that highlights particularly helpful or impressive KML layers: The Google Earth Gallery. Currently highlighted: the HMS Endurance’s trip to Antarctica, and another take on Darfur, this one with a lot if site-specific information about individual villages. Excitingly, a lot of this content is tagged with categories, so expect plenty more of such “best of” content. It’s a 3D Warehouse for geospatial datasets, if you will. (Google’s announcement)
• BeLight’s Live Interior 3D 1.1 gains the ability to import SketchUp content. Coming at the tail end of a slew of similar announcements by 3D authoring tool developers, it seems that in the CAD world, SketchUp’s native file format is attaining a prominence not unlike what KML has achieved in the GIS world.
• The Mediterranean Archaeology Geographic Information System (MAGIS) project looks like it will soon be available as KML.
• Roderic Page’s iPhylo blog writes about his own recent efforts at “playing with Google Earth as a phylogeny viewer”. (Previous posts on phylogenetics: here, here and here).
• Arounder.com does not currently have a Google Earth layer associated with it, but it is a wonderfully executed amalgam of 360-degree panorama imagery, soundscapes, Google Maps, and textual guided tours of some of the most interesting cities in Europe, but also of places in the US and even of missions to the Moon. Worth a visit.