Ten days on, the default Darfur layer in Google Earth is still making waves — on blogs and on bulletin boards, in columns and presidential speeches. Purely in terms of media exposure, this is without a doubt the most successful default layer ever added to Google Earth, and that is entirely a Good Thing ™.

Several further thoughts on the past week:

• I think the media were generous towards the idea of rallying to the cause of Darfur, because there is certainly a will among news people to give it more exposure, but in an event-driven news cycle “Darfur still suffering” just doesn’t cut it. The Google Earth layer, however, provided the media with a timely pretext for raising the issue again, and the tech angle gave the stories something other than just despair and doom, which news editors were eager to highlight. That’s what drove the wide coverage.
• Many people are passively aware of the crisis in Darfur, but do not necessarily know where exactly Darfur is, though they may even feel that they probably should know. The Google Earth layer provided a ready opportunity to turn that passive awareness into an active and rewarding quest, and many embraced it. As a result, far more people now know where Darfur is compared to two weeks ago.

So what’s next? Tobedetermined! has a good point:

Why not include a button in the Google Earth layer where I can immediately put my money where my mouth is (even if it’s a single euro) in order to help the relief effort, or better, help rebuild the particular village I am looking at at this very instant in Google Earth.

It’s one of the possibilities that was mooted, in the abstract, early on in the process: Wouldn’t it be nice if we could add donation placemarks, so that people could make a connection and then immediately send microdonations? But the project soon took on a life of its own, and the focus became documenting the atrocities, which is best done neutrally. The canvassing can always come later.

Well, how about now? The Darfur Wall is an an initiative by the Seattle-based Darfur Foundation, and it sends 100% of the proceeds to four Darfur relief organizations: Doctors Without Borders, Save Darfur, Save the Children, and the Sudan Aid Fund. Plus, the website is a cool piece of savvy programming:

Ogle Earth’s traffic spike this past week resulted in some windfall advertising revenue. I’ve just sent all of that to Darfur via the Darfur Wall.

If this blog were a reputable news organization, I wouldn’t post single-sourced items, but it’s not, so here we go:

Somebody I know well just emailed me this:

Thought you might be interested in this note that just came in from an aid worker in Darfur (to remain anonymous):

At dinner tonight I just found out that google earth has now been blocked by the govt…so, those of us who had already downloaded it can access it but those who haven’t are unable to view it.

Before the story turns into an urban myth, I’m just wondering if anybody else in Sudan can corroborate this? What is strange about the above snippet is that it sounds like the client download has been blocked, not the data server, and that doesn’t seem like a particularly smart way to proceed (if that is indeed what has happened — wouldn’t the entire google.com domain have to go down with it?). Or perhaps by “downloaded” the person meant “cached”…? Or perhaps it was just a bad few hours for the internet in Sudan?

(Yes, aid workers have access to the internet in Darfur. Dragging the internet there is child’s play compared to ending the crisis.)

BTW, should Google Earth indeed be blocked, you can easily get around it (albeit with a download speed penalty) using the Tor anonymizing tool, as Uwe Hermann first discovered. The instructions look daunting at first glance but it’s actually straightforward: Download and install multiplatform Tor GUI Vidalia, then change your internet connection settings so that both HTTP and HTTPS traffic is directed to a local proxy server: IP address 127.0.0.1, port 8118. I’m running Google Earth using Tor this very second, and it works fine, though slowly. Still, once the area you’re interested in is in your cache, you’re all set. And to be clear: If you use Tor, no central authority can tell if your data requests eventually end up at Google, so they’ll have to block the entire internet to keep you from accessing Google Earth.

• Mickey Mellen over at Google Earth Hacks is back to his innovating ways: He’s developed pmShare. It lets you upload placemarks to Google Earth Hacks directly from within Google Earth. Mickey can explain the technical details better himself:
  

  Using some of the techniques I used for GEwar, I’ve developed a couple of custom network links for people to create, post and comment on KML files without leaving GE. It makes some use of the built in web browser (no way around that if people need to type in descriptions, comments, etc), but I’ve kept that to a minimum. Also, I figured out a way to pass their user info to that built-in browser (which I couldn’t do with GEwar), so they don’t need to be logged in on that session of IE for it to work.

  The idea was to make it easier for people to share places. Granted, it’s not real hard right now, but it involves adding a placemark, naming it, saving it, finding it after it’s saved, then uploading it again somewhere else. With these new scripts, this all just happens right in GE and posts directly to our site (and also gives them a “send this to a friend” link).

• Do you use Mediawiki? KML Export extension is up to version 1.2.0. What is it? “KML Export is an extension that generates KML files for Google Earth

  from content in article pages.” Version 1.2.0 generates KML 2.1.

• Ed Parsons has a good tip for getting your Nokia N95 to hook up with GPS satellites faster. Your N95, because I don’t have mine yet.

Open source geospatial software evangelist Paul Ramsey writes a must-read post for those of us who are curious as to where KML is headed. He’s got minutes of sorts from the most recent Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee meeting, and while the meeting may have been boring, the news coming out of it is not. For those of us with short attention spans, here are the CliffsNotes:

• KML 2.1 is becoming part of the OGC standards process (we knew this already).
• The OGC will begin work on codifying KML 3.0.
• Google will continue to improve on KML 2.x, and the OGC will decide whether these changes make it into KML 3.0.
• We should get KML 3.0 within the year.
• In Q&A time, Google Earth CTO Michael Jones was asked whether Google being the only vendor involved in extending KML 2.x didn’t give Google too much power in the process. According to Ramsey, Jones replied that “he had approached Microsoft and ESRI to join in the standardization process of KML, and will continue to invite them to the table. In the end, an OGC process with Google and invitations to the others is better than no process at all. I find it hard to disagree with that.”

While we’re on the subject, any wishes for what should go into KML 3.0? I know what I want: A way of controlling the user experience from within the code — for example, by being able to choose whether popups appear in a tour, how fast such a tour should run, and whether a tour should start automatically. I’d also love to have better time-line functionality (along these lines), and the ability to subscribe to GeoRSS and WMS from within KML network links.

Perhaps a bit further off, I’d love a way to be able to turn on or off objects in the middle of a tour process; perhaps this could be done by repurposing the timeline functionality, so that you can set user perspectives at different points in a timeline and also have objects/layers becoming visible/invisible at timeline points. This sort of timeline would be measured in minutes of duration, of course, not absolute time, as the current timeline is in Google Earth. (This suggestion is copied wholesale from Matt Nolan’s EarthSLOT, whose tour functionality truly shines — see this demo).

Oh, and before I forget — how cool would it be if you could use KML to upload your homegrown DEMs to go with your high resolution overlays?

If you think any of these ideas are particularly bad, do let me know as well.

(See a Google Earth feature wishlist from almost exactly a year ago, and check up on what’s been implemented in the meantime. Hint: The Matterhorn is looking rather fantastic in Google Earth these days.)

Some more mobile mapping news:

• Mologogo, a web service that already lets you use a GPS enabled mobile phone to update your position on Google Earth and Maps, is now also adopting the Twitter “protocol” for sending position updates via SMS. Here’s how to use it. (Via Make)
• FON is a “social” wifi service that’s popular in many countries — if you share your own wifi, you get to use others’ when you travel. This makes it a tempting service for users of mobile phones like the Nokia N80 and N95, which have wifi access. The web browsers on these phones are not ideal for the complicated FON Map, however, which is why Rainer Simon is working on FONFinder. As Rainer writes on his blog, it’s almost finished. When he’s done, you’ll be able to submit an address and get the nearest hotspots delivered to you on a map. Nice idea.

And in the not-too-far-off future, I’m sure, you’ll be able to mash up Mologogo with FONFinder so you don’t even have to submit an address. Just ping FONFinder with MoloTwit and get hotspots back… and perhaps anything else nearby you need.

As a way of advertising its wares, Dutch GPS services provider Smart Position is at this very minute relaying live position data of two runners in the Rotterdam Marathon, which started Sunday at 11:00 local time (09:00 UTC). You can watch them via a KML network link and in Google Maps.

(Via Nederkaart)

• The mobile publishing revolution will be mapped… Twitter Facts lists SEVEN different Twitter mapping solutions. Twittervision cousin Twittermap is especially interesting — it shows the most recent tweets for a given zoomed-in view. So far, no solution that I am aware of offers a network link for Google Earth, and it is not yet possible to see just the georeferenced tweets of the people you subscribe to. But I’m guessing that this is just a matter of time.
• Of interest to GIS pros (but no doubt they already know): Brian Flood & Co’s Arc2Earth Publisher has been released. Arc2Earth Publisher goes beyond the exporting of ESRI ArcGIS content to KML that Arc2Earth Standard does; it can also publish map tiles for Google Earth, the Google Maps API, and the Microsoft Virtual Earth API; it can even write the API code for you; and you have the option of serving the tiles from Amazon S3’s scalable server space. Also, Arc2Earth Publisher can do Google Earth Superoverlays, so that you get progressively higher resolution tiles shown as you zoom in.

  The upshot for us consumers? More good content. FYI, Arc2Earth was used in the making of many of the prototypes for the Darfur layers, currently in Google Earth.

• Live Maps/Virtual Earth/Live Local’s product manager responds to the Laudati/Scoble thread on the web app’s inability to gain prominence. He doesn’t seem to think the multiple names are too much of a problem (and I think he is wrong), but he does praise the Google Maps developers for their slick new editing features (as we did:-)