Google Earth’s imagery data has been updated once again. This post on Google Earth Community has the details: Downtown Vancouver gets the high resolution treatment, as do various shires in the UK and a couple of French cities. Plenty of new high resolution stuff in the US as well.

As for updated imagery, Spain (incl. the Canary Islands) and bits of the US get Google’s love this time round. Details below the fold.

Continue reading Google Earth imagery update: Vancouver, UK, France, Connecticut, etc… →

This is the mother of Google Earth/Second Life mashups: GeoGlobe. Writes Josh Knauer in this blog post:

The GeoGlobe takes feeds (currently KML, GeoRSS and RSS) as input and displays them as properly geolocated prims onto the GeoGlobe [in Second Life]. We undertook this project to experiment with how “real world” data can be visualized effectively within the immersive environment that is SL. Far too often, designers/builders in SL rely on old user interaction paradigms for displaying information. We wanted to push the boundaries a bit for how users can interact with feeds of data available on the web by bringing them into SL in the context of a Google Earth-like experience.

Josh is all too right about people often not using Second Life’s native advantages (such as object scripting) to the fullest. He was at SciFoo last year, where he gave an impressive demo of the Information Commons, a peer-to-peer model for updating GIS information. This here GeoGlobe is just as impressive, and just what I was looking for as a way of visualizing the locations of Swedish embassies around the world in our upcoming virtual embassy in Second Life. Here I am checking it out:

While playing with useamap.com for the previous post, I noticed that Sweden now has directions, not just in Google Maps but also in Google Earth. I don’t remember that being the case, and it’s undocumented. Here’s my old route to work, if I had a car. Yay. Still, Eniro.se currently has more of Sweden in high resolution, albeit censored.

Gorgeous new mashup alert: Use a Map.

Basically, find a spot on Google Maps, then save it as a short URL. A bit like tinyurl.com for places, you might think, except that this is just the beginning:

Give the map a user ID and password, so you can edit it. Then edit the accompanying description or map icon, add a photo gallery (!) or a link, fix the zoom level or map type, decide whether to allow comments and/or password-protect it (if you like).

We’re just getting going. Click on a button to see the view i Google Earth, embed the map on your site using the suppled HTML, email the map to friends, and — the tour de force — click anywhere else on the map to get directions to/from the placemark. Big deal? Sure, as you are just clicking on the map — the web app finds the nearest road and number, and then gets to work finding the route.

Impressive stuff — linking to Google Earth of course helps on this blog:-) (i just wish some of the services, like directions, had their own permalinked URLs, in case we want to link to those.)

• That was fast: Jiro Shirota has written a Space Navigator driver for ESRI ArcMap 9.2, and puts up a demo on Google Video. (Via comments — where would this blog be without comments?)
• Christopher Schmidt is fed up with all those Google Earth blogs on Planet GeoSpatial (apologies all round:-) so he’s built his own planet, Planet OSGeo, focusing on open source GIS blogs. Personally, I like planets because they give me a lightning quick overview of what GIS news has broken, without me having to fire up my news reader and its 1,000+ feeds — I wonder if that sort of informational extravagance is bad for the environment:-) Remember too that anyone can roll their own: Either by siccing this greasemonkey script on James Fee’s Planet GeoSpatial or else using the newly revamped FeedDigest.
• Just wanted to highlight an interesting observation made by GeoLibro a few days back, also noted by the NSGIC blog:
  

  …if the U.S. government is serious about us learning and using the National Grid (USNG), they need to have Google use it for U.S. locations.

  This reminded me in turn of the article written about Apple not so long ago in the Wall Street Journal, regarding its burgeoning influence in the music world:

  The decisions by the small group of Silicon Valley and music-industry veterans running iTunes can help put an unknown band on the map, adding millions of dollars in sales, while relegating others to the obscurity of the site’s virtual back bins.

  It’s remarkable how both Google and Apple have managed to get themselves into the role of a rainmaker in an industry where they had absolutely no presence just a few years ago.

(Part 2 of the stories I missed last week)

3DConnexion has released a software development kit (SDK) for Windows and announced one for the Mac (due March 30). (A Linux version is already available). This should make it much easier to get 3DConnexion navigation devices like the Space Navigator to work with existing 3D applications — I’m hoping for an expedited plugin for Second Life, but also for Brain Explorer, Celestia and the most excellent PointCloudXplore viewer for the Berkeley Drosophila Transcription Network Project. These are all enhanced reality viewers, and they should benefit greatly from a dedicated navigation tool.

Also this week, 3DConnexion announced its devices now work with NASA World Wind (though we had been tipped off that this was coming by The Earth is Square.

(Part 1 of the stories I missed last week)

The Google Maps API Blog announced support in Google Maps for the GeoRSS data format, a light and standards-based XML vocabulary for georeferencing content in RSS feeds (for example). This means that you can now simply drop a GeoRSS-enabled feed into the Google Maps search box and see the contents displayed geographically.

In the same post, Google also announced that the Google Maps API now supports the loading of KML files (in addition to GeoRSS). This means you can now show KML files on your own Google Maps on your website, as an alternative to displaying them in Google Earth.

Geobloggers’ Rev Dan Catt has a fine expository post on the news, O’Reilly Radar looks at the implications (playing with a GeoRSS-enabled Flickr feed), and Christian Spanring looks at what the next step of development might be: “Maybe GeoRSS feeds getting indexed for searches within Google Earth?”

Knowing that you could once turn a Google Maps view into KML simply by appending “&output=kml” to the permalink URL (alas the trick no longer works), I tried that hack on the permalink URL of a Google Map with a GeoRSS feed attached, hoping for a kind of pipeline to getting GeoRSS converted into KML for Google Earth. No such luck:-) Do remember however that Yahoo! Pipes is very GeoRSS-savvy, so using Google Maps in combination with Pipes should allow for some interesting results.

And finally, as Google Earth already has WMS support (albeit rudimentary), here’s hoping GeoRSS feeds will soon also be supported natively — perhaps as an admissible URL for a network link? As has been pointed out before, GeoRSS and KML do not compete — they are far apart on the ease/power axis of geospatial formats.