- Neogeography in the media, I: BBC: GPS helps pygmies defend forest. If it works in the Amazon, there’s no reason why it can’t work in Africa.
- Neogeography in the media, II: The Wall Street Journal’s Mossberg Solution reviews the SPOT Satellite Messenger. Tell the world where you are (or ask for help) from anywhere, cheaply, via satellite. No mobile phone network required!
- Neogeography in the media, III: BBC: Egyptology from the air. Video showing some cool aerial shots of Amarna, Akhenaten’s ancient capital, taken from an unmanned balloon. More about the city in this BBC article. Amarna has been featured in the context of Google Earth here on Ogle Earth before.
- Metaverse Conference: Metaverse U is a two-day conference hosted by Stanford University’s Humanities Lab on February 16-17 where a range of interesting speakers will discuss, well, metaverses. In addition to the usual suspects, what’s interesting is that Rebecca Moore, of Google Earth Outreach, is also a speaker. No doubt because Google Earth is the most popular specimen of a specific subset of metaverse, the mirror world. (Register by February 11)
Which reminds me, how is that “Social Google Earth” going, you know the one being tested last September at Arizona State University that would be “publicly launched later this year”, i.e. 2007, according to Google Operating System blog?
And whatever happened to CNET’s “scoop” last October about the hook-up between Google and Multiverse Networks? Blogs, you just can’t trust ’em:-) (Via Terra Nova)
- GEOPortal soft-launches: KMLabs notes the stealth launch of GEOPortal, by the European Space Agency’s Group on Earth Observations. It’s open source and soon downloadable so that you can incorporate it on your own website. It looks quite slick — it’s a browser-based 3D globe onto which you can attach all manner of information. Not so much a mapping solution as a new way of getting at country-level info, however. (At least that is the impression I got.)
- Nokia Location Tagger: Nokia Beta Labs’ just-released Location Tagger automatically adds EXIF data to the photos you take with Nokia S60 phones like my Nokia N95. Yay! But what took them so long? It’s the obvious thing to do with a GPS-enabled camera phone. (More in that vein over at Dan Catt’s Geobloggers.)
EXIF-based georeferencing beats Shozu‘s clever but stop-gap geotagging when uploading to Flickr from an N95; but now I can still use Shozu to upload photos on the fly to Flickr, as Flickr can read EXIF tags and automatically map georeferenced photos. Check out the instructions for details.
- ArcGIS Explorer update: ArcGIS Explorer version 450 is released, fixing some compatibility issues with graphics cards.
- KML Regions how-to: GeoChalkboard is knee-deep into a tutorial on KML Regions, first basic, then advanced, and now on how to use Regions with Arc2Earth.
- Crysis 3D Warehouse: The geniuses at Digital Urban have figured out how to import any model in Google’s 3D Warehouse into the current hit first-person shooter Crysis. This takes the concept of modding to a whole new level.