Valery35 and KASSPER over on Google Earth Communty pull off a great hack. Using the online collaborative spreadsheet service www.editgrid.com, they’ve managed to create spreadsheet-driven KML that can be linked to directly from within a network link.

It took me a while for the implications to sink in, but boy what implications. Import any old spreadsheet with coordinate or placename data into editgrid, add a sheet or two with wrapper KML code, use the concatenate formula to wrap the data into the valid KML code, put the end result in one cell, and then link to it directly from a network link via a cell-specific URL. Presto — your spreadsheet returns KML via some clever templating. No programming required.

What’s more, the spreadsheet can be altered collaboratively, and the results will change live for users, as soon as the network link is refreshed.

The best early example is this spreadsheet by Valery, where the data is concatenated into valid KML in cell K12 of sheet 4. Put that latter link into a network link in Google Earth, or just stick it into Google Maps, like so. Awesome, and I’m not using the term lightly.

The main innovation here (in addition to the great idea) is that editgrid.com gives individual spreadsheet cells unique URLs, and that these return the value of the cell. I could not find an equivalent feature in Google Spreadsheets (despite having a good look around). This is a clear case of convergence outpacing Google’s own inhouse efforts.

TradeArabia follows up on the decree by Bahrain’s Minitrue Information Ministry to block access to Google Earth’s data servers in the country.

It would appear that the order came from the Information Minister himself, Dr Mohammed Abdul Ghaffar, and that no explanation was given for the decision. All this makes criticism of the move as easy as shooting fish in a barrel; Bahrain Internet Society chairman Ahmed Al Hujairi obliges:

They (the government) had previously said that they wanted to block sites that were against Bahrain’s values, such as porn sites, but why did they block Google Earth?

(Indeed, Mahmood’s Den reported last week that Bahrain began blocking what authorities called “material against the local culture, religion, politics or societal norms”.)

(The New York Times mentions the blocking of Google Earth in Bahrain in passing in this article on Arab reformers.)

Yesterday, Mahmood posted again on censorship in Bahrain, but I want to correct him on a perception he shares with many users that Google censors its imagery, ostensibly at the request of various governments.

Google doesn’t censor. Google licenses imagery from satellite and aerial data providers such as DigitalGlobe, Aerodata and The Geoinformation Group, or gets it for free from public companies like Grafcan. It is the data providers, however, that are bound by the censorship laws of the country they launch from (in the case of satellite imagery providers) or operate in (in the case of aerial imagery providers). Google is free to shop around for the best, least censored data it can find, and with each data update, there are on the whole fewer and fewer censored areas.

• Okay, so another Chinese submarine tunnel has been identified, this time by East-Asia-Intel.com, but is it really so hard for them to give us a placemark so we can go look for ourselves? It took all of 10 seconds scouring the high resolution areas of Hainan before it popped out at me. Anyways, I’ve posted the placemark to Google Earth Community (entire post). (Here is another submarine tunnel, blogged back in February.) (Via Intelligence Watch)
• If for whatever reason you do not already have Avi Bar-Ze’ev’s feed in your reader, he’s got another post on the Skyline patent suit that’s well worth reading. [Update 2006-08-09: The Earth is Square retorts.
• It’s official — Mapdex‘s Jeremy Bartley is leaving the Kansas Geological Survey to join ESRI’s core ArcGIS Server team. Congrats. I sincerely hope Mapdex doesn’t go a way as a result.

Regular reader Rip points to a post on a blog maintained by Israel-based Defense-Update.com entitled “Iranian made [unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)] Intercepted Over the Israeli Mediterranean Coast“. Relevant bit for our purposes:

The Hezbollah conducts extensive intelligence gathering activity to improve its capability to target sensitive Israeli sites, utilizing signals intelligence (SIGINT), long range observations conducted by its own forces, as well as utilizing intelligence support and weather forecasts (required for accurate aiming of its medium range rockets) provided by Syria. Target analysis, including coordinates gathering has been dramatically improved in recent months, as a significant part of Israel was included in “Google Earth” service, offering everyone a free access to relatively high resolution satellite images of Israel, provided with fairly accurate GPS coordinates which are accurate enough to support the aiming of rocket attacks.

The high resolution imagery of northern Israel by DigitalGlobe added to Google Earth’s dataset in early June 2006 is from 2002 and 2003. It is for sale to the public. Iran and Syria have access to far more recent and accurate satellite imagery. The notion of Hezbollah waiting on Google Earth to acquire target coordinates for their long-standing rocket arsenal is ludicrous, in my opinion. While Google Earth would do a “good enough” job of providing such data for permanent landmarks, any army with pretensions of competency would long have access to such coordinate data.

Rip has his own good points:

Note unguided rockets are quite different than UAVs; their Circular Error Probable (CEPs) upon arrival at the end of their flight are fairly gross. Knowing the exact distance and heading from the launcher to the target likely helps a bit. It reduces the CEP from terrible to very bad. I have seen no comments about any survey (large or small) to compare GE derived ground coordinates to ground truth. In any case, the inventory of Hezbollah UAVs has to be quite tiny so the threat they present is mostly propagandistic.

Yes, GE and GPS do provide weapon guidance potential (i.e., targeting) for “ballpark” (as “in the ballpark”) hits by unguided rockets; but, there are a host of other factors which hugely vary the effectiveness of non-terminally guided munitions.

Welcome to another effect of globalization…

(Caveat empor: This post is about a war. The first casualty of war is often truth. While the source material for this item looks credible to me, I can’t substantiate it.)

Sensor webs are very cool. Collaborative sensor webs are even cooler. Blitzortung.org is a user-contributed lightning data network for central Europe. if you have a directional lightning detector and a PC connected to the internet, you too can help construct a European lightning map in near-real time.

And then, you can look at it via a network link in Google Earth. (There are stand-alone viewers as well.)

Mahmood’s Den is reporting that Bahrain’s Ministry of Information has instructed the country’s internet exchange to block access to Google Earth servers, citing Al-Wasat News. I don’t speak Arabic, but Systran’s automated Arabic-English translation service comes to the rescue (it still needs some work, clearly:-):

Knew “the middle” that in familiarity of Bahrain for the Internet, faithful second step have fun after lewd locking the sites, decided yesterday closing of service “[GwGl] [aayrth]”, which manages from during her [mtSfHH] the Internet from watching the geographical informers and the natural maps for any area in the scientist.

No more [Gwgl] [aayrth] for Bahrainis, then, unless they avail themselves of Tor, as Mahmood points out.

I’m curious as to whether Google Maps has been blocked, or for that matter other mapping sites. Mahmood attributes the motivation to a desire to shield Bahrainis from the opulence of rich Bahrainis’ residences. For example, here is where the king’s uncle lives:

I suspect that the measure was instituted only because looking at royal property had become a very popular pastime for the locals recently. Nevertheless, the ban is somewhat surprising — Bahrain is a constitutional monarchy, but it is among the more progressive countries in the region (though everything’s relative). (Via Global Voices)

[Update 00:03 UTC: Slashdot has it too, with a link to Google’s translation, which does a better job of it.]

[Update 00:14 UTC: The ban does not seem to be having the intended effect (surprise surprise).SIlly Bahraini Girl writes:

Now someone.. anyone.. just tell me how to download images from Google Earth and I am game guys.. Tell me what you want me to zoom into and how to get the images published, and your wish is my command!

A few weeks ago, the health services of Amsterdam tracked down an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease using Google Earth, reports Trouw, a Dutch newspaper, today.

The details, translated from Dutch: Starting July 6, around 30 people became infected, of which two died. Soon, a certain type of “cooling tower” in the center of the city was suspected of being the culprit, but Dutch authorities did not have a list of such towers to inspect. Instead, health workers used Google Earth to visually identify all buildings in the area that had such towers on their roofs, and then contacted building management in each to determine whether it was the at-risk kind.

On July 18, one of the identified towers — on top of the old central post office building just to the east of Amsterdam’s central station — proved to be the origin of the outbreak. End of story.

You might wonder, of course, why Dutch authorities didn’t use some kind of official national imaging system. I suspect the reason is that Google Earth’s dataset (minus the bits censored by the Dutch government) is pretty much as good as it gets when it comes to coverage of Amsterdam, and that speed was of the essence. Still, a large area just to the east of the central station is thoroughly censored (it’s the Navy barracks in Amsterdam), so imagine if that’s where the outbreak had in fact started — they’d still be looking. (Via Jan Marijnissen Weblog)