Amnesty International today launches Eyes on Darfur, a project whose major component is a website that focuses on 12 specific Darfur villages, the intention being to depict the ongoing tragedy on a human scale as a way of motivating visitors to take action:

Eyes On Darfur also breaks new ground in protecting human rights by allowing people around the world to literally “watch over” and protect twelve intact, but highly vulnerable, villages using commercially available satellite imagery.

In practice, this means that a Flash application (why-oh-why break the browser’s back button and lock the satellite imagery into a proprietary format?) makes satellite imagery available to visitors that is just weeks or months old, and often also photos from before attacks.

Every initiative on Darfur is a worthy initiative. I would love, however, for this weeks-old data from Darfur to be made available in an open, georeferenced formats, in time series and on a much wider scale, so that GIS volunteers really can monitor villages for change. I’d gladly “adopt” one of the 1,600 villages and monitor it, given the data. I also think Flash is not the best visualization tool for geospatial data — there is not the natural flexibility with layers and such that lets this content be truly compelling and immersive:

The dots show destroyed structures, but cover those said structures, and you can’t take them off. So I hope this new data also makes it into Google Earth.

India’s The Economic Times reports that, not surprisingly, the Indian government is attempting to use the news of the JFK plotters’ affinity for Google Earth as a planning tool as a leveraging tool in their own attempts to censor Google Earth imagery for India.

A high-level meeting was today held in Union home ministry to frame a concrete strategy to tackle the possible threat posed by Google Earth, which provides easy access to satellite imagery of vital installations across the country.

There seems to be mistaken assumption (or a deliberate misrepresentation) on the part of the Indian government that:

Google had last year assured New Delhi that it would remove high-resolution images of vital installations across India but security agencies still fear that militant groups could use this facility to create terror.

That has been categorically denied by Google. Another point not addressed: There are plenty of sources other than Google for this kind of content, including the exact same content.

I’m on my way to San Francisco to attend ISDE5, but the layover at Newark is proving to be a perfect interlude for blogging:

• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended gets a free plugin that lets you search Google 3D Warehouse for content, download it and edit from within the program. Download here.
• Nokia Sports Tracker gets updated to version 1.49, with some improvements to the KML export function.
• Did Google Earth help NYC terrorists? “The answer is an unequivocal no.” (Regarding terminology in common use right now: If you plan on murdering someone but you are caught before you do so, are you a murderer? If you plan a terrorist act but are caught before you execute your plan, are you a terrorist? When everybody is a terrorist, nobody is.)
• Regarding the censorship of French imagery: The Map Room and others do remind us that this imagery is censored at the source, not by Google (it’s good to repeat this) but one thing Google still can do is choose not to buy Spot Image’s censored datasets. DigitalGlobe’s data isn’t censored over France. Is it a question of cost? Is France giving Google an offer that it can’t refuse? (I’m asking, these aren’t rhetorical questions hinting at a conspiracy.)
• Magnalox, a site for storing and publishing GPS tracks, has been announcing some cool new features: First came free live tracking for GPS-enabled mobile phones (both Windows Mobile and Symbian S60) to Google Maps and Earth (though you may have to buy the tracking software), then came the ability to embed the Google Maps tracker on any site, and today also a Mac OS X dashboard widget version of the Google Maps tracker. Here’s a live embedded tracker for a person riding his motorcycle through the Alps (and who is okay with publicizing the data):

[Removed.] Hmm, looks like that particular implementation of doesn’t play nice with Google Adsense code. Here is the link instead.

With the latest imagery update, France goes Dutch, discovers Henri Willox at Le Blogue du LFG. By which we mean that several places get higher resolution imagery, except that sensitive sites happen to be there, and these are now reduced to 20-meter resolution pixels. (Just like the Dutch imagery Google Earth got last year.)

Because Google Maps hasn’t updated yet, Henri is able to show with screen shots two before-and-after cases. I myself took a Google Maps screenshot and

overlaid it on Google Earth so you can check the difference for yourself using the transparency slider:

I do wish there was full disclosure in these update announcements. If there is a new dose of censorship somewhere, whether justified or not, I’d much prefer to be told right off the bat rather than have to find out via wily bloggers. Organizations that aim to organize the world’s information should despise censorship, and when it happens, document it as a necessary evil, if that’s what it is.

• James Fee notes that ESRI ArcGIS Explorer is now publicly available. And here I was thinking all this time that it was publicly available:-)
• Some new sample code, a schema and examples of ObsKML by Jeremy Cothran. ObsKML provides a standard way of adding metadata to KML items.
• What better way to illustrate a paper on climatic connectivity than by using Google Earth?
• Judith Bush discovers that if you search for KML layers in Google Maps, the application gives you the option to “”Save to Mapplets”, so that you can mash it up agains other geospatial data.
• Imagery overlays that makes you wish for ocean DEMs in Google Earth: The UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency has put the results of its civil hydrography program online, as KML. (Via Silicon.com)
• Gridskipper gets a new look — one that is a lot more map savvy, as it should be.

Kai Chi Leung at the University of Minnesota has a very interesting PDF presentation highlighting the differences between Google Maps for China and Google Maps for the rest of the world. He concludes that there is censorship in the Chinese version of Google Maps (and the omission of the disputed Arunachal Pradesh area between China and India is a clear giveaway), but notes that both versions are available in China — so you can always use the international version if you want.

That’s similar to how Google Search works in China: The local version is censored, devoid of links that China’s internet censors disallows anyway; but the international version is also available, so Chinese surfers at least have an inkling of what they’re missing.

But the justification for the censoring of Chinese Google Search has been made on usability grounds: Google said it did not want to return links that don’t lead anywhere. That justification doesn’t work for labels and borders on maps — you don’t click on them to do anything.

The more likely answer is that Google is bending to demands of the Chinese government as a price for being able to operate in the country. At least this censorship stays within China, and doesn’t befoul the international version of Google Maps.

Note that Kai’s research is only for the map view of Maps, not the satellite view. I highly doubt there is a separate version of Google Earth for Chinese IP addresses. At least not yet.

Jonathan Thompson from Humanlink writes:

Frank and Stefan-

New high res imagery for Aceh region in Indonesia and, more importantly, eastern Chad. Abéché is the main support base for aid activities in eastern Chad and Guéréda supports Kounoungou, Mille and Am Nabak camps. Still searching for other updates but for your relief worker readers these are useful.