TechCrunch has been providing some great coverage of the upcoming crop of Google StreetView competitors. After covering Everyscape, they now have a preview of Earthmine, which lets you annotate content inside its street views.

(For some reason, all these services use San Francisco as their prototype/demo:-)

Note, too, that the company providing the technology and content for Google’s StreetView until now, Immersive Media, has announced it will no longer be providing Google with content after the end of the year. Meanwhile, Google is arranging to acquire its own content. Emad Fanous speculates the reason for the split-up is licensing issues. Specifically, Google wants to incorporate the imagery into their Google Maps API (or some other unspecified API).

And why might Google want to do that? Well, just look at what Everyscape and Earthmine are up to.

I do think the winner in this, however, will be whoever manages to open up their API the most. Who will let me embed on iMyFacePressType a guided tour of my walk up Fifth Avenue, annotated with what I bought on the sides of the buildings where I bought it? Or will the mooted Google MyWorld let you do something like that? Perhaps using SketchUp models, so you can annotate favorite art in museums or the locations of employees’ offices at HQ? (Or not?)

Google’s secret of its success in the mapping world has been to be as welcoming as possible to user-generated content, both by removing all barriers to contributing and by providing the best possible background canvas on which to display the content. Until now, panorama views of specific locations in Google Earth have been provided by third parties such as Gigapxl, Gigapan and 360Cities. But with the advent of Earthmine, such content is becoming part of the annotatable canvas.

If systematically created panoramas as part of the annotatable canvas are the future, will user-generated or third-party content still be able to compete? It will if future versions of KML allow us to pinpoint placemarks within panoramas, link between panoramas, and connect such in-panorama placemarks to geographic locations on the base map.

In the long run, of course, we’d just want to be able to paint panoramas onto a very accurate 3D rendering of the world, so that every spot in the panorama and its corresponding coordinate on Earth become one. And while this is technically a complicated feat, the best stab at this I’ve seen is Microsoft’s impressive PhotoSynth.

In the very long run, of course, we’re all dead. Pardon this meandering post:-)

• Imagery update: Google Earth gets new high resolution imagery, much of it “concentrated in the U.S., Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, Australia and New Zealand” according to Google Lat Long Blog. The rest of the post gives some hints as to where to look. Happy hunting.
• GE Boards: Mickey Mellen of Google Earth Hacks has come out with yet another server side scripting wonder: GE Boards, a bulletin board system that resides entirely with Google Earth, served via network links, using Google Earth 4.2’s Flash support to let people submit or filter content from within a placemark popup. Mac and Linux users can browse the contents of the layer, but the Flash features are Windows only for now. You can read Mickey’s entire email below the fold. (Mickey made the first Google Earth-based game, GE War.)
• GeoCommons: FortiusOne’s Geocommons — a mapping tool that can generate heatmaps from datasets — gets a major update, with new features described in the company’s Moving Past Pushpins blog.
• Island in the news: Near-real time cartography — of Jabal al-Tayr island in the Red Sea, which recently erupted. Lovely!
• Open House: Have a 2D floor plan? Metropix is producing 3D KML visualizations for free — at least if you are among the first 1,000. (First mentioned here.)

Continue reading Links: Imagery update, GE Boards, Geocommons update →

• Nokia makes its mapping play: Nokia buys Navteq for $8.1 billion. (But that’s in US dollars, not Canadian dollars, so it’s relatively cheap for a Finnish company:-) As the race to form the best human sensor web hots up, The coming together of gadget makers and content producers continues apace: Apple and Google form a team when it comes to mapping on the iPhone, TomTom snapped up Tele Atlas, and now Nokia buys Navteq. Which leaves Garmin with… Microsoft? And where is Yahoo!’s strategy? They had some clever mobile technology prototypes 18 months ago…
• Phylogenetics2KML: Those phylogeographers sure are a resourceful bunch. If you’re an evolutionary biologist, you may do your analysis with Mesquite. iPhylo flags an update to Mesquite’s cartographer module, which lets you automatically map genetic mutations using trees. The update now lets you export the results as KML. (Previous efforts were home-grown.) iPhylo has the screenshot eye candy.
• TITAN does (more) KML: Leica TITAN, a tool for sharing GIS content on a virtual globe, gets an update, and gains the ability to draw polygons on the terrain that can be saved as KML. (From an email to subscribers on September 26 — I can’t for the life of me find a mention on the website. Somebody please help Leica with their corporate communications.)
• Census explorer: Free Geography Tools flags and reviews the nifty GE-Census Explorer for Windows.
• Local Outreach: On October 9, the Net Tuesday San Francisco meetup will host Steve Miller, Product Manager, Google Earth Outreach.

This is just weird: The Korea Times reports that Samsung has adopted Google as its role model, because of, well, Google Sky:

Google’s newly launched virtual telescope service might have impressed Samsung Electronics chief executive as he looked for a way to explain the reforms taking place in the company.

Yun Jong-yong, CEO and vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, said Monday in his monthly speech that Google Sky, a free navigational package of celestial images, was a product of a “creative corporate culture” – a theme that he and Chairman Lee Kun-hee has been stressing all year.

“Vice chairman Yun stressed that the company should create new values with unique products and services that can fulfill the customers’ potential needs, and he took Google Earth’s Sky service as an example of this,” the company said in a release on Monday.

Unless Samsung is aiming to get out of the gadget-building game and into the information-organizing game, I’d seriously recommend looking up to Apple, not Google. Not surprisingly, Apple and Google collaborate as equals (See Google Maps for iPhone), whereas Samsung is just being starstruck, and fixating on the wrong star to boot.

There is more anecdotal evidence of US-imposed censorship of Google Earth in certain countries. A commenter with an IP address in Syria reports that attempts to download Google Earth in Syria now meet the same fate as those in Sudan, due to US export restrictions and economics sanctions. Meanwhile, blogger Macu at Milfuegos reports that a slew of Google products is not available in Cuba, including Google Earth. I’m trying to get confirmation in both cases.

It’s not clear in either (likely) case whether this enforcement of US-imposed sanctions laws is a recent change — I suspect not. That doesn’t make it any less stupid. If I lament the fact that users in Morocco (such as today’s commenter) continue to be prevented by their own government from using Google Earth, I certainly can’t applaud the US government doing it pre-emptively for the Syrian, Sudanese and Cuban governments. Google and Google Earth help level the informational playing field between political elites and the masses in those countries where democracy is lacking, which makes it easier for those citizens to demand accountability. The US sanctions regime in each of these cases is badly targeted: By prohibiting access to a software application that is actually a browser of georeferenced information, the US is effectively censoring this information among those people who could use it most.

Meanwhile, those who live in Morocco, Sudan, Syria or Cuba can use Tor to spoof their country of origin to Google’s servers. The only problem: It is very slow, so not optimal for Google Earth’s streaming data.

Burma has been in the news this week, but the human rights abuses being perpetrated by Burmese government forces have been ongoing for a generation. In one region, a separatist movement by the Karen people is habitually repressed by attacking and displacing civilian villages on the grounds that they provide support to separatist fighters.

Such tactics are evident on satellite imagery, and now an initiative by Lars Bromley at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has commissioned before-and-after imagery to show the effects of this ongoing ethnic cleansing program.

The AAAS has written a news release linking to the detailed report containing the imagery, which in turn link to a KML file that georeferences those images on top of Google Earth:

Before (Ikonos, Nov 11, 2000):

After (Quickbird, June 24, 2007):

This isn’t the first time that geospatial technology has been used to document human rights violations. Back in June 2006, the AAAS documented the razing of villages in Zimbabwe, and later also the effect of the 2006 war in Lebanon and the ongoing crisis in Darfur. In April 2007, a layer documenting the Darfur crisis prepared by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and others became a default layer in Google Earth. North Korea has also been extensively annotated. What all these initiatives make clear is that when it comes to documenting the effects of human rights abuses on large populations, satellite imagery can do valuable service in lending credence to reports of violations and in raising public awareness.

The AAAS report on Burma makes for interesting reading, especially regarding what’s next:

AAAS also is investigating the possibility of developing a Web-based geospatial information portal of the Burma conflict. This portal would, to the extent possible, summarize attack-related information and provide access to satellite imagery to a select group of NGOs. Lastly, AAAS will begin making available, via a Web site, its tools for roughly matching village name spellings with coordinates and available satellite imagery. Ideally, all these tools together will improve information-sharing regarding the conflict in Burma, and improve collective understanding and planning efforts. […]

Other organizations are encouraged to consider this content as available for any future media project using Google Earth. For example, a Burma Google Earth product modeled after the Darfur layers released by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum might be ideal.

Matching village names as used by their inhabitants to the transliterated names on maps was also one of the main challenges in making the USHMM Darfur layer. Having such collaborative tools exist on the web would greatly facilitate the work of human rights organizations everywhere.

Less encouraging, once again, is how the media reported the AAAS announcement of the report this Friday. Because it was timely, the mainstream media gave it welcome prominence (See the NYT, MSNBC) but once again, every online news item I read fails not only to link on to the KML layer, but also the detailed report. The geoweb is not going to be transformative until the average news reader starts consuming georeferenced information published to a geobrowser, and that won’t happen until and unless news organizations start linking to such content. Bloggers link to source material all the time; why can’t journalists, especially if the “story” is about the release of georeferenced satellite imagery?

Any story headlined “Astronomers Find Mysterious Radio Burst” gets clicked on by me faster than you can say “colliding neutron stars”. Space.com reports on the research paper published today in Science Express (ArXiv.org has the whole paper for free). Space.com’s article also has an accompanying image pinpointing the burst’s location in the sky, near the Small Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere:

Because that image exists, and because Google Sky exists, these two had to be mashed up. Voila:

As usual, play with the opacity slider to compare the overlay with the, erm, underlay.

Some caveats: Google Earth/Sky’s image overlay tool still uses polar coordinates only; real-field-of-view images get difficult to position near the poles, especially at larger scales/wider angles. Still, the fit is quite good, especially when considering that the location of the radio burst is somewhat vague.

Just as geographers have begun to append their papers with KML files containing the relevant overlays and data, I hope that astronomers and astrophysicists start doing the same soon. After all, 250 million computer screens can now display such a discovery accurately, and in the wider context of the sky. Surely science outreach doesn’t get any easier than this?