I’m in Shanghai now, I’ve found a place to stay for a while, and things are settling down to a merely moderately hectic pace. The shopping here is incredible — I’m not the shopping type, but already I’ve bought a bike, a legally unlocked iPhone (take that, Swedish Telia!) and have been ogling some very innovatively designed tea sets in trendy shopping alleys that have sprung up all over the place.

In other words, time to start blogging again. Thanks for bearing with me during this hiatus. And while I promised I wouldn’t do this any more, here are links to stuff that caught my eye this past month.

• The Sea Ice Physics and Ecosystem eXperiment, September to October 2007, now in Google Earth.
• “1,000-year-old fishing trap found on Google Earth“, says the UK’s Telegraph, without telling us where. Fortunately, Frank Taylor finds it for us.
• “Google Earth detects tsunami ‘trigger’ spot in Caribbean“, or rather, a scientist uses the application to discover an area of coastline on Dominica that is vulnerable to collapse. Of course, the article doesn’t show us where this coasatline is, but I suspect it is this place.
• CNet has a Q&A: California lawmaker wants to blur Google Earth. Joel Anderson is clearly wading into something which he hasn’t thought through.
• UK’s Telegraph: “Google Earth used by thief to pinpoint buildings with valuable lead roofs“. Quick, let’s blur all the roofs! Then the burglar will have to go back to driving around town, looking at them from his car. But at least the world will be made safe again from tech-savvy lead roof burglars.
• The [unofficial] History of Virtual Worlds, by Avi Bar-Zeev.
• Anything the Sun writes sets off my BS detector. Including “Google cheat view“, about a woman who supposedly used Street View to find her husband’s car parked outside a mutual friend’s house when he was supposed to away be on business. Main problem with this story: She couldn’t have known when the Street View imagery was taken. In other words, the story was made up. In the Sun? Shocking!
• ReadWriteWeb: Real Time Cities, or Just Info Porn?
• Google Earth as conceptual art muse: “Dead pixel in Google Earth” by Helmut Smits.
• The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System is a EU and UN initiative that “provides near real-time alerts about natural disasters around the world and tools to facilitate response coordination.” It’s got a Google Earth layer.
• ReadWriteWeb: “Finally, A Practical Use for Second Life“, about data visualization in virtual worlds.
• TED Talk: Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech. Plenty of out-of-the-box thinking there with potential applications in the neogeo arena.
• Last but not least, Karen and Frank Taylor are soon setting off on adventures nautical, and are geoblogging them.

Up next, probably tomorrow: Something about the wholly expected privacy brouhaha in the UK.