• As high resolution imagery of Sri Lanka has come to Google Earth, a local bloggers debate as to whether Google Earth is a threat to security or a boon to Sri Lankans.
• NASA World Wind’s upcoming KML support in pictures.
• Aha! There is a secret side to NASA World Wind. And I who thought NASA funded open source software for the sheer hell of it:-) Come to think of it — the DoD outsourcing its programming to open source volunteers is genius!
• An all-caps post announces thart Sketchup3D.org will be closing soon, and invites you to download its tutorials and components before they do. Don’t ask me what all that is about.
• Need advanced SketchUp skills? DesignMentor Training is offering online courses.

Google Maps now has “Saved Locations”, linked to my Google account. It’s still a bit iffy, though. At first I assumed that adding a location would save the current view, but in fact it does nothing of the sort — it geocodes whatever you type into the New Location field and saves the resulting view, with a popup for the label you’ve added. Also, if you type in a location in lowercase with auto-saving of locations enabled, you will end up with duplicated locations — one lowercased and one capitalized — if you click on the lowercased one:

It would have been more intuitive to me to have a “Save this location” button next to the “Link to this page” button. At the moment, I still find it easier to bookmark permalinked Google maps views and then have Google Browser Sync backup my bookmarks for me. In other words, this new feature adds no value (for me).

There still no “open in Google Earth” button on the toolbar — we already know that appending “&output=kml” to the permlink is all it takes. Finally, I hope this is the first step to syncing my Google Earth placemarks with Google Maps — my Google Maps Saved Locations, my Google Earth Community posts and my Google Earth Places content are all similar — so why not make them syncable?

• One more thing (The Earth is Square): “WWGML markup language is on hold for now till the KML support in World Wind is complete.”

  I think that is a wise move. Any attempt to break out with yet another strain of geographic markup language is unlikely to succeed right now. (It will be very interesting to see how Microsoft tackles the “problem” of a de facto standard that they don’t “own”.) I do wish one of the NASA World Wind bloggers would go into some more detail about the extent to which KML will be supported in the near future. Network links? Icon data? KML 2.1? Collada textures? I’m curious, because several scientists have asked me in recent days about what subset of KML tags they should use if they want to make their files viewable “universally”. I don’t expect to find out about ESRI ArcGIS explorer’s KML support any time soon, but perhaps NASA World Wind’s developers can oblige us?

  [UPDATE 2006-08-04: They can. Thanks!]

• Londonist interviews Andrew Hudson-Smith, author of Digitally Distributed Environments. it’s a great read, and it contains this gem:
  

  When we boot up Google Earth, it’s annoying to find that cities like New York are already included in 3-D, but London isn’t. You have to download individual buildings drawn by skilled amateurs. Why is that?

  We have talked with Google and if we can sort out the licensing, as I mentioned above, the Virtual London model would come with Google Earth and you wouldn’t have to download models from various websites or blogs, including our own.

• Animals in Google Earth are generally a Good Thing. It turns out the Erik Born’s walrus data referred to in the Spiegel article from earlier this week is actually publicly available — in fact, it was turned into KML by polar KML guru Leif Toudal. The website is only in Danish, but the walrus data is included in the KMZ file for Greenland’s western basin. (There is also a file for the Eastern Basin.) Alas, the transmitters are no longer active, so the data is no longer live, but there is a good chance of renewed live data soon.
• ESRI does GeoRSS. To be more specific, its ArcWeb Services JavaScript API, out of beta today, can parse GeoRSS feeds. (Via GeoRSS Blog).

Ryan Arp’s Google Earth Enterprise Blog does exactly what the title suggests: Blog Google Earth Enterprise, the version I know nothing about:-) It’s a great niche to fill. Here is Ryan’s inaugural post and mission statement. James Fee has already added the blog to Planet GeoSpatial.

What I like to know about Google Earth Enterprise: How is it different from Google Earth Pro? Specifically, how does the time browser work? (And are there other cool features like that?) How is GEE different from ESRI’s ArcGIS offerings or other competing products? (Better? Worse? At what price?) What file formats do you end up using? What hacks or third party solutions do you end up using? What’s the tech support like? How do the different bundles and components compare? Oh, and lots of eye candy please.

• SimCity aficionados are turning to Google Earth to ensure the accuracy of their creations… Sometimes you can practically taste the convergence.
• Toponymic tussle: Asia Media reports South Korea’s National Geographic Information Institute “will hand over an English-language map of Korea to Google this month with a request that the U.S. Internet company stop using Japanese terms on the map of Korea.” Other organizations will get the map as well.
• VirtualGlobes.org is a “directory to centralize the access to the various KML projects users came up with. Feel free to add a link to your KML project, KML tool, or anything at all KML or Google Earth related to the listing.”
• The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) tries out Atlas Gloves, and posts a video . It works!
• I kinda dropped the ball on Microsoft’s Photosynth, a photo georeferencing tool with a twist whose technology preview video demo is wholly impressive. Digitally Distributed Environments has a nice writeup, as does Search Engine Watch.

  I wonder if their choice of venue — St. Marks Square, an urban space — has to do with the limits of the technology. Trees and lanscapes must be more difficult, but so would photos taken of the same place over time, as new buildings are added. I suspect all of these challenges could be circumvented with some user-generated tweaking, though.

  Photosynth certainly looks like a prime candidate for inclusion in Microsoft’s upcoming 3D virtual globe — Microsoft principal researcher Rick Szeliski is quoted in the video saying “Once we can take all the world’s photos and organize them in 3D…” That definitely carries an echo Google’s mission statement.

• Google Earth for Dummies, coming in December (Via Google Earth Blog).

From drought to flood: Five weeks after the release of Geofeeder, another Flickr network link has been launched: Flickr KML Feed 1.0 by MetalToad‘s Jason Stege.

How are they different? Flickr KML Feed is extremely fast, shows more photos (up to 250 at once), and highlights the most interesting ones (as determined by Flickr users.) Geofeeder shows fewer photos, though the icon is a thumbnail of the photo. But why choose? Using both network links simultaneously works great.

The Earth is Square posts notes from a recent NASA World Wind development meeting. Kudos for being so open. Here’s a CliffsNotes version:

• The Java versions of NASA World Wind (for the Mac and Linux) appear to be delayed somewhat, with perhaps something beta-like on offer in late October, vs. September originally.

(Bummer. Why? I’m on an Intel Mac. I can and do use BootCamp to run NWW natively in XP, but that requires a restart, and keeps me from my regular desktop. Parallels Desktop lets me use Windows without rebooting, but it doesn’t yet support DirectX, which NWW requires. The upshot: I’m still not using NWW regularly.)

• Future NWW development seems to be moving to the .NET 2.0 platform, in addition to requiring DirectX. There are some concerns raised that this would narrow the installable user base, but the conclusion seems to be that it’s best to go with the newest software technologies as a way of building the best possible geobrowser.

This is a definitely a different tack from the one taken by Google Earth, where the priority for version 4.0 seems to have been to widen the user base as much as possible, with feature-equivalent versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and a focus on speed optimizations. Nor does the Windows version of GE depend on .NET, while DirectX is optional, allowing the application to be used by (many more) older computers. All this is in keeping with the notion of Google Earth as a geobrowser — just as with web browsers, the user’s choice of operating system doesn’t matter; the content is entirely platform-neutral.

I can see two reasons for this divergence in tactics. 1) When your resources are comparatively limited (as is the case for NWW), you want to get the biggest bang for your development buck, and 2) if you’re volunteering for an open source project, you want to have fun, and making NWW run on old computers isn’t perhaps all that much fun. I’d do exactly the same:-)

What isn’t clear to me, though, is how (or if) the cross-platform Java version of NWW will be feature-equivalent with the PC version. Specifically, most add-ons are Windows executable files. How will these be made usable on Macs and Linux? Will plugins work? Will Mac and Linux users be able to author add-ons?

• Finally, the exclusivity deal between Google and DigitalGlobe is discussed. The sourcing on this is getting iffy, but:
  

  [adamhill] yeah and google said that what [DigitalGlobe] said was wrong as well

  [Bull_[UK]] lol

  [adamhill] they only prohibit *commerical* use

  Which would mean that the DigitalGlobe salesman quoted in the Geowanking mailing list was misinformed.