• Dan Karran’s KML module for the Drupal content management system is out. Some very pleasant surprises: You can get KML files containing posts (“nodes”) tagged with a particular term, and also KML for search results containing geospatial data… and you can order the content, to facilitate flythroughs. There’s more. Get it here.
• For the Mac, OSXplanet hits version 1.0. It’s a free, impressive screensaver of Earth (and other bodies in the solar system), with overlays for weather, satellites, earthquakes and volcanoes. All by a 17-year old Gabriel Otte.
• I didn’t know this. You can google “terrain of belgium” and get a direct answer back from the CIA Factbook as a first response. Google has other such geographic search shortcuts, as listed by Google Blogoscoped. Cool, but this just begets the question: Why stop there with the integration? Where is the KML overlay? Wouldn’t the best way to deliver geographic information from a Google search usually be via Google Earth or Maps?
• Valery Hronusov has a revamped start page up that aggregates and categorizes many of the GIS and Google Earth-related projects that are on Google Earth Community, and elsewhere.
• Display watch: A 32-inch 3D-ish monitor, as reviewed by The Register. (Via WorldCAD Access)
• WorldWind reaches 10 million downloads on SourceForge.
• Morocco’s ISPs’ problems with Google Earth are still not resolved, according to this user.
• Mmm, Principal Groundwater Aquifers of the United States (at Topographic Map Archive, where there is a lot more great stuff.)
• Not previously noticed on my radar: Hawkeye ($70) for Microsoft MapPoint syncs your view in MapPoint with the same view in Google Earth (and Virtual Earth).
• Cool: the Nantucket Sound Ferry Scientific Environmental Monitoring System provides live positioning data and environmental data, as a network link too, of course. (Via this LiveJournal post)
• Google Earth, art instrument to Janice Caswell, currently showing in New York.
• Earthbrowser‘s Matt Giger has a swipe at Google Earth, faulting it for an aging codebase and a kludgy API (the KML file format) and adds:
  

  EarthBrowser (as primitive as it was) had the virtual globe market all to itself from 1998 to about 2002 when I first heard about Keyhole EarthViewer when someone from Keyhole offered to buy earthbrowser.com and my customer list.

  Matt also promises that the next version of EarthBrowser will have a “fully scriptable game engine”. I’d be interested to know Matt’s opinion of NASA World Wind as a competitor.

• Valery Hronusov’s EditGrid-based path calculator with output as KML uses all of the latest EditGrid XSL features. Where is Google Spreadsheets? What is the point of collecting disparate technologies under one roof if you don’t get any benefits from it? Meanwhile, EditGrid adds RSS feeds for new spreadsheets, etc…
• Interesting idea: “I am just testing an AppleScript from Adam Burt which takes a screenshot of google earth and posts it to a blog via ecto. Does lots of tagging and produces metadata too.” It’s for the Blojsom CMS.
• Another GPS-to-Google-Earth tool: GPS2GoogleEarth ($20) for PocketPC.
• Photo georeferencing tool RoboGEO is up to 4.4 ($35). It now supports Flickr’s new API.

[Update 08:59 UTC: One more thing: The British Airways layer that is getting so much press attention and its own TV commercial doesn’t work (for me) if I use the Mac version of Google Earth v4 beta. Specifically, the “price clouds” are white rectangles rather than transparent numbers. Yes, it’s beta, but I wouldn’t encourage a mainstream company to use cutting edge versions of software if it means that a significant portion of its users won’t get what’s intended.]

I’ll be living the idyllic life on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago for the next week or so while I hunt for an apartment in town. Due to a lack of easy access to the internet there, a pictoresque but longish daily commute by boat to work, and the apartment hunting effort, Google Earth coverage will necessarily be restricted. In other words, expect more abbreviated news like this:

• Mark Zeman’s FlickrMap becomes Trippermap, still looks gorgeous, and now uses Flickr’s new geotagging API to let you tag Flickr photos in Google Earth directly. Yuan.CC Maps has also upgraded to the new Flickr API. There is now every reason to convert one’s old geotags into the new system (using Flickr’s import tool.)
• Declan Butler posts that he interviews NASA World Wind’s Patrick Hogan in the latest issue of Nature. Next up for Earth’s dataset: Lighting and shading.
• TechWorld: WiFi network planner uses Google Earth
• Interesting press release: “Farallon Geographics built a web-based interface using a free Oracle Express database and a free Google Earth interface to assist 2 San Francisco Bay Area Geological Hazard Abatement Districts manage risks related to property damage from potential landslides and other disasters.”
• How does Google Earth keep track of all that data it serves? With its home-grown “Bigtable” database. Read all about it.
• A new version of Arc2Earth is out. Brian Flood explains what’s new. (Via GIS User)
• Documenting Picasa, an even niche-ier blog than this one, notes that Google has registered googleimagetagger.com, and speculates as to what it could mean.
• Chris Holmes writes up his GeoServer Tech Talk at the Googleplex, now available on video.

As reported in Forbes, British Airways does some marketing with Google Earth — or is it the other way round?:-)

There’s two parts to this campaign: On BA’s website, a Google Earth layer that shows prices for different destinations; and a lovely television commercial by BA for the UK market that features Google earth (via Kreativt Forum.) Here is the video.

While BA’s layer is not the most efficient way to book flights if you know where you want to go, it is undeniably an entertaining way to plan serendipitously. And the overlay also uses KML interestingly, in that rolling over an icon switches it to another image. (The KML tags involved are StyleMap, Pair, Key and StyleURL — copy a placemark in Google Earth and paste it into a text editor to see the syntax at work.)

• More innovation from Valery using EditGrid’s ability to reference individual cells via a URL: Turn text into a graphic using an online service, and then use it as an overlay in Google Earth. Clever, that.
• Meawhile, Public Beta 11 of EditGrid is out, with last week’s XSL hacks turned into properly documented features.
• Blipstar is an Google Maps-based store locator maker for small businesses. It comes with KML support. (Via CNet)

Interesting news out of China yesterday, picked up by Google Earth Blog, The Map Room, et. al.: China to tighten foreigners’ mapping activities. Reading the tea leaves of Chinese press releases is fun — in this case, though, I think the language is obviously aimed at data gathering within China proper. It would be ludicrous for China to propose its sovereignty suddenly extends into space — this would fly in the face of international treaty and customary law, to which China is bound.

Were in fact China to propose that DigitalGlobe and its competitors not be allowed to collect and/or sell and/or publish satellite images of China, and attempt to impose economic or legal hardships on companies that don’t abide by its bidding, I’m willing to bet China would suddenly find itself at the butt end of reciprocal sanctions from Washington. But since China’s leadership is smart, this scenario won’t happen.

There is another gray area, however, that has nothing to do with satellite imagery: The publishing of what China considers to be military secrets to public forums like Google Earth Community (GEC). I have no idea whether China is worried that publicly available “sensitive” information is made much more accessible via posts to GEC (e.g. the locations and overlays of subterranean submarine tunnels). This information is also available elsewhere on the internet, but those elsewheres aren’t owned by Google. I think this makes Google vulnerable to ploys by Google’s competitors in China. (It wouldn’t be the first time either, as this NYT article from a few months ago pointed out.) Consider this scenario: Citing this new law, and egged on by Baidu, Chinese officials demand of Google’s Chinese subsidiary that specific posts about sensitive Chinese locations be deleted, because it is obvious that the information they contain was gathered on location — and that Google make the identities of several of the posters available to Chinese officials, so that they can be prosecuted should they ever show up in China. Failure of Google to do so would presumably result in Google being blocked in China, fines, or worse.

Continuing steadily along this increasingly speculative path, I’m sure Google would balk at doing a Yahoo! and would instead opt to cease operating in China rather than face the PR fiasco that would accompany the divulging of names.

Google is expanding its philantropic activities in India, writes BusinessWeek. Why mention it here? Google Earth plays a bit part:

Page has volunteered to loan out Google engineers to work with the hospital’s technology team to build a robust IT infrastructure to handle the volume of patient data. He has also offered to train the hospital’s technicians at Google’s offices and provide Google Earth technology to map India’s large blind population.

But the big picture is also interesting: Philantropy is an absolute good, regardless of motive. Nevertheless, should India’s government try to play hardball with Google Earth over Google Earth’s high resolution imagery of India (to which it objects), it will now need to explain to its electorate how a company that is helping India’s 12 million blind is evil exactly, and why preventing access to imagery that is publicly available anyway is more important than alleviating the suffering of its people. (Via the Purple Bubble 2.1)

What a conundrum. You develop a great piece of social software for sharing photos on the web, so good in fact that users spontaneously hack your tagging system to allow the easy addition of georeferencing information via the API and the visualization of these photos on a competitor’s map (via its great API). Other photo sharing sites are beginning to eye built-in georeferencing as a way to compete with you. To remain competitive, would you:

1. Hire the most impressive of these spontaneous geohackers, and give this flourishing geotagging folksonomy an institutional backing? In-house mapping tools would make it extremely intuitive for anyone to georeference photos, but the results would still be compatible with the geotagging standard, so that the effort put into hundreds of thousands of photos is built upon, rather than supplanted.
2. Hire the most impressive of these spontaneous geohackers, and have him build a brand new georeferencing system from scratch? This way, the technology is optimised from the get-go for georeferencing, rather than have to piggyback on tags. For example, it allows for separate privacy settings for photos and their geospatial data. Of course, the geotags on hundreds of thousands of photos on your site will be de facto deprecated, leaving those users with a geotagging “inventory” the choice of continuing with geotags or starting over with the new system…

I myself would have chosen the first option. Flickr clearly chose the latter one. Perhaps all the benefits of option 2 are not yet apparent, but what I hope will happen soon is the following:

• Somebody offers a conversion utility that converts a user’s geotags to the new Yahoo! system. [Flickr has — see comments] Or vice versa, for that matter. (I’m surprised Flickr didn’t do this by default. Geotags are public anyway, and it would have given their new system a running start.)
• Flickr KML Feed and Yuan CC maps are adapted to work with the new Flickr system. I want my Flickr photos in Google Earth, absent Yahoo! Earth.
• Flickr’s georeferencing system gains features quickly to include some of the innovations being made with geotags, such as FlickrFly’s expanded geotag vocabulary.

As an aside, it is interesting to see how Yahoo! and Google have differentiated themselves when it comes to georereferencing photos. Google’s solution is a tie-up between Picasa and Google Earth — both of them standalone applications. Yahoo!, in contrast, relies on two web-based services. Each solution has strong points: For Google, this allows for a far better editing feature set (Picasa) and visualization (Google Earth). For Yahoo!, the integration between Maps and Flickr is far tighter, allowing for such features as batch georeferencing and privacy levels for georeferencing.

PS: I’m traveling again, this time back to Stockholm, and then I’ll be apartment-hunting, so my access to the internet, and hence to this blog, may again be extremely spotty for a while.