Integrating online collaborative spreadsheets over on EditGrid with Google Earth (and much else besides) continues to get quite a few people excited. Digital Geography, for example, latches on immediately to the educational opportunities this this combo affords.

Meanhwhile, EditGrid’s developers have released add-ons, including Grid2Map, which converts spreadsheets with postal addresses to Google Maps via a simple wizard.

But the most interesting development is the collaboration between Valery Hronusov and EditGrid’s Alan Tam, here on the EditGrid user forum. Alan’s point is this:

Thanks for all your brillant effort trying to use Deep Permalink to generate KML files. We in EditGrid, however, think that this solution, although works, is a sub-optimal way to let user manage their data.

In Beta 10, we have released a feature allowing exporting the whole spreadsheet into an XML file. This XML file can be optionally passed through an XSL Transformation to form another XML or text file.

That really amazing, especially as Alan comes up with an example for Valery’s data:

• Here is Valery’s spreadsheet.
• Here it is as XML.
• Here is the XSL that transforms that to KML.
• Here is the resultant KML file.
• And here it is in Google Maps.

Just like magic.

[Update 2006-08-24 00:11 UCT: Forgot the punchline: Because the XML is updated automatically as you change the spreadsheet, so is the KML. It’s therefore worthwhile to subscribe to the KML via a network link, to keep it dynamic.]

• This is the second mention in blogs, but I haven’t seen it confirmed by a news service: Apparently, Google Earth’s servers are inaccessible in Morocco. (Either that or somebody had trouble connecting and before you know it, a meme is born.) Can anybody in Morocco confirm or deny this story?
• Oracle publishes a detailed technical article by mappinghacks.com‘s Rich Gibson on how to Build a Google Earth Interface on Oracle Database XE. The examples use PHP. (Via Arun’s Blog)
• Le Blogue du LFG finds another remarkable KML resource: Methalithic portal’s online database of over 15,000 prehistoric monuments is now online.

For my own reference, now:

• James Fee is right. Loc.alize.us‘s Flickr geotagging bookmarklet is the easiest way to georeference one’s photos. Once they’re in there, view them in Google Earth thus.
• Geody is a very interesting geosearch portal. Unique feature: Look up stuff on the moon and other planets. back on Earth, search results come linked to Google Earth, NASA World Wind, etc…

Another nifty way of visualizing scientific data: Deep-Sea News (gotta love them niche blogs) reports that over 3,500 dives by the Alvin submarine (star of many a National Geographic Special) are now mapped to KML as part of the Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS) project.

Deep-Sea News has the lowdown on the Alvin dives. in the meantime, I went trawling through the geodata directories of MGDS, and found many more interesting KML files. For example:

• High resolution maps of the ocean floor of the Pacific, as mapped by Alvin.
• An awesome KML file with the names of thousands of ocean floor geographic features. It’s like Geonames.org for underwater geography.
• Huge high resolution maps of the Indian Ocean (not for the faint of CPU).
• Thousands of sediment cores, georeferenced to their database entries online.
• The Earth’s tectonic plates and boundaries. (Nice one)

  

• Several hundred georeferenced photos of the seabed, as if Alvin had a Flickr account (and why wouldn’t it?).

  

I’m just exhausted from exploring this treasure trove. Go do your own digging here. (it’s OK, MGDS links to it from the home page.) It definitely makes you wish for the promised bathymetry data in Google Earth.

• The next weird thing to come out of China: Huge lines in the desert. As AbFab’s Patsy would say, “Yeah, but is it art, Eddie?” (Via Google Earth Hacks)
• Alan Glennon plays with EditGrid — he uses the fact that you can reference individual cells via HTML to produce a proof-of-concept PHP script that extracts data from EditGrid cells and turns it into a KML file. Love it.
• AutoDesk does a bundle with Google Earth Pro. All Points Blog has good commentary, and comments.
• ViaTime: “Simulating the world of air travel for children using Google Earth.” Seems to have been around for months, but it’s new to me. Let’s you — ahem, children — create fantasy airlines with mock routes and then watch your flights, teaching you about great circle distances in the process. By Matt Paskus at Western Washington University’s department of geography.

• Truly Frustrating: Truthbox has a post up with extensive images depicting overlays on Google Earth pinpointing poppy fields in Afghanistan and Colombia, but then doesn’t provide the files themselves so that we can have a go. Google Earth is interactive, people — it’s not a movie prop. [Update 2006-08-22: KML files are now added (see comments).]
• In the Netherlands, Groningen city council members belonging to the Dutch liberal party VVD are demanding that Google Earth depict high resolution images of their town. “Every corner of the world is visible, and yet Groningen is still a grey smudge and that just not allowed,” says the local VVD leader. He feels the city council should make existing digital imagery available to Google ASAP. His reasoning: It’s a way for hotels and camping grounds to present themselves to a wider public very cheaply.
• InformationWeek reports on Strong Angel III, a major disaster response exercise taking place in San Diego this week. Among the many tools at the disposal of first responders:
  

  A disaster scene mash-up based on the open source Sahana disaster management software, created by Sri Lankan programmer Chamindra de Silva. Sahana can be used to establish missing person registries, coordinate relief efforts among groups, request support, and keep track of victims in shelters. The combination of Google Earth with Sahana will create a detailed visual image of a disaster area. Google plans to work with Microsoft to ensure that the modified Sahana works with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth service.

The Jane Goodall Institute’s Gombe Chimp Blog has gone live with a major renovation. It now makes full use of Google Earth to explore Gombe National Park and the stories that take place there. Start with the latest entry to see how. There is a ton of added information that can be overlaid on top of the high resolution imagery of northwestern Tanzania — archives, first of all, but also local landmarks, chimp bios (with links to videos), watersheds, human settlements, trails, park boundaries…

But what’s really innovative is how we’re asked to navigate this content. The popup window is turned into what amounts to a traditional web page (albeit using tables, as CSS is not available) with a column of links that upload further KML. This allows you to avoid the unwieldy Layers pane, in most cases.

All this turns the Gombe Chimp Blog into an instant favorite for science outreach. It also pushes Google Earth’s HTML rendering to the limit — it sure would be nice to be able to generate W3C-compliant rendering of CSS and XHTML inside Google Earth popups in the future. I, for one, would also like to see video depicted inside popups. It’s a natural thing to expect, from a user-interface perspective.

Kudos to Bryce Tugwell, BTW, for concocting all this. He adds that there is more enhanced data on the way. Hopefully, we’ll soon also get a network link we can subscribe to.

Families in a new housing estate in North Salt Lake, Utah, are unsure about the presence of Stericycle, an industrial waste recycler, in their midst, reports Deseret News. Google Earth plays a supporting role in the proceedings:

Though Folgmann is still trying to decide where to send her children to school, she said she’s concerned about the black soot that adorns the top of the incinerator.

After she read the news article [about Stericycle], her 12-year-old son, Drew, used Google Earth to look at incinerator sites around Utah. A black circle sits atop Stericycle’s facility but not on top of the Davis County burn plant or on top of the Deseret Chemical Depot, which incinerates chemical and neurological weapons.

Though the state says there is nothing to worry about, her son may be onto something. Here is a KMZ file with Stericycle’s facility and the nearby housing estate marked. The facility looks pretty soot-ridden indeed, though the one caveat on this amateur sleuthing is that it is hard to ascertain when the image was taken — DigitalGlobe’s metadata is noncommittal on the matter.

Some further meta-commentary: 1) Why doesn’t Deseret News provide us with the placemarks? This should be part of the requirements of the beat, these days. 2) If you’re a business, can you still afford to neglect your rooftop’s aesthetics? Sure, not everybody needs to paint roofs in IKEA colors or with Target targets, but filthy rooftops will now be noticed, it seems.