Valery Hronusov and the usual suspects over on Google Earth Community have aggregated a number of Google Earth-centric blogs’ feeds, wrung them through geonames.org‘s geocoder, and turned them into a folderful of KML network links for you.

It’s a praiseworthy effort, but it also highlights the hit-or-miss nature of attempting to coax geospatial information out of an inchoate, semantically bare mass of text. Take, for example, Ogle Earth‘s current list of entries: Some of them contain multiple references to widely disparate locations, some of them contain no references at all, some of them reference place names not in a geospatial context but in a cultural context (First we take Manhattan?), and some of them contain the geospatial reference implicitly, in a KML link. And then there is room for error: The Gombe Chimp blog entry is placed in Gombe, Nigeria, for example.

In sum, I think that in the automated post-processing of blog content is not nearly as effective as the pre-processing of content — i.e. where blog authors ensure that there are no semantic ambigiuities possible when it comes to georeferencing their posts.

It’s just that blog content management systems have been very slow in giving bloggers the tools to let them do this — where, for example, is even the most rudimentary support for GeoRSS or KML out the box in Movable Type, (Google’s) Blogger, MSN Spaces…? Photo-sharing sites have been much faster off the mark.

Some CMSes are more versatile than others, however. Over the past week or two I’ve been playing with pMachine’s Expression Engine, and boy is it powerful, if not without quirks. Sorry to get into specifics now, but it lets you define custom fields, such as for place names and coordinates, and then lets you use these fields wherever you want in your templates, in a variety of contexts.

The result: IPY.org/start, A just soft-launched GeoRSS-savvy website about next year’s International Polar Year (IPY). Expression Engine comes out of the box with conditional tags, so for each post, if there is coordinate data, the GeoRSS feed will have it, while on the web the post links to a Google Map, either using the geocoded place name or the coordinates (with the coordinate pair getting priority, if it’s there.)

The main unsolved challenge is dealing with multiple relevant locations in one post. It’s not something that GeoRSS is really set up to handle, as far as I can see. (Here’s my favorite solution for solving this problem, but it would require some rewiring of HTML code). The current setup, at least, lets the author nominate which single location is the most relevant, if any.

To the collection of origin myths of Google Earth (notably, Mark Aubin’s mention of Power’s of Ten, John Hanke’s mention of Snow Crash, Michael Jones’s mention of the Star Trek ricorder) you can now add Keyhole cofounder Avi Bar-Ze’ev’s version of events. Namely, we have Google Earth thanks to Al Gore. Sort of.

Two quick ones that caught my fancy:

• Australia’s The Age does some actual reporting, unlike some of us, er, blogs: Chinese X-file not so mysterious after all
• America’s most Gerrymandered districts, by Dimitri Rotow, as decided by an algorithm for “crinkliness”. (Context here.) The things we let our politicians get away with…. Here’s the area around Atlanta:

  

  Yes, those are two contiguous zones. Why not just go with proportional representation?

High resolution imagery of remote places can be mesmerising. Take, for example the southermost high resolution imagery currently available in Google Earth (as far as I can tell), of Candlemas and Vindication islands, part of the South Sandwich Islands, at 57 degrees south. The satellite image is just crawling with icebergs, and the quality is stunning:

Here is a direct KML link, from the Global Volcanism Program, a great site that is thoroughly georeferenced with KML files. (And here is the Tagzania link.)

Furthest north, I found two high resolution areas at 77 degrees north: In Russia, the northernmost bit of Novaya Zemlya, and in Canada, Intrepid Inlet in Prince Patrick Island.

Finally does anyone know what this high resolution area in Norway is good for? I suspect it is a shooting range, but there aren’t any Google Earth Community postings about it (which is rare, these days:-).

What’s the state of photo georeferencing like on the Mac ? Well, it’s been lagging compared to what’s on offer for PCs, especially if you look at the latest version of Picasa, but now there’s a catch-up effort under way. Craig Stanton has been working on iPhotoToGoogleEarth, a plugin that exports iPhoto photos with EXIF coordinate metadata to KML. It’s still in beta, and doesn’t yet work on Intel Macs, but do give this free software a try and help with feedback.

How do you attach EXIF coordinate metadata to photos using the Mac in the first place? Craig recommends GPS Photo Linker, another free application which takes time-coded GPX data and marries it with your photos’ time-coded EXIF data.

For getting GPX data off GPS devices, try LoadMyTracks, a wonderfully simple yet effective free application for importing GPX tracks onto your Mac. (It imports tracks as KML as well.)

If you need more advanced support for specific GPS devices, MacGPS Pro 6 does that, and a lot more besides ($50).

A collection of short news items that is rather longer than I expected:

• GeoServer is up to version 1.3.3. The latest release has “some enhancements and fixes to the KML output format so it will work with the newer versions of Google Earth.” Download here.
• Sweden is relatively underrepresented when it comes to Google Earth’s base data (What, no Göteborg?). Now someone has figured out a way to superimpose high resolution tiles of Swedish web mapping service Eniro, via a network link.

  

  Very slick — just make sure you’re not looking at areas that are already in high resolution in Google Earth, or where Eniro’s data has been tampered with by the Swedish government for “security” purposes. Actually, come to think of it, this should make it even easier to find those spots that do have something to hide. (A nice find by Le Blogue du LFG – Guadalajara.) Anybody working on getting Géoportail’s tiles into Google Earth?:-)

• I had never heard of the 500-meter high wave that swept through Lituya Bay, Alaska, after an earthquake in 1958. I do now, thanks to aerial imagery and a map that somebody has turned into a KML file. A lovely piece of geographic exposition.

  

• The variety of GIS, AEC and BIM 3D applications out there never ceases to amaze me. Version 5.1 of Navisworks Jetstream, which seems to be used for visualizing complex pipe assemblies, will now export to KML. (Mmm, it also has stereo viewing built in.) (Via JTBWorld)
• Following this Ogle Earth article on directional icons for weather symbols, Japan’s Bugs Bunny blog comes up with directional icons for photos, which depict the direction in which a photo was taken. I think that’s a wonderful idea. Here is Bugs Bunny’s example.
• One of the illustrations in this Cadalyst magazine article on how SketchUp is being used by new users and by schools shows a chess piece being made with SketchUp. Now that Battleships exists in Google Earth, this got me thinking… How about a chess game in Google Earth? Of course, it’d be a game where you move the chess piece not so much when it’s your turn but whenever you manage to travel to it. You’d then have to “carry” it to the correct square to drop it. Variations of the game could involve allowing you to “carry” up to two pieces at a time, say:-)

  (Tron would also be a wonderful candidate for a real-life game, but it turns out it’s so wonderful that it’s already been done, as reported by we-make-money-not-art back in january 2005.)

• The US NOAA has a new website where many of its RIDGE radar images can be uploaded as KML. They’re asking for feedback, so: Except for the dataset with warning polygons, only static downloads available. Is this for bandwidth reasons? Wouldn’t network links refreshing every 30 minutes or so make more sense for visual weather data?
• Geosoft’s Dapple is a specialized application (Windows XP only) derived from NASA World Wind that focuses just on just the tools useful for the Earth sciences. Interestingly, the open source status of Dapple means that World Wind developers will be able to incorporate Dapple’s innovations in future versions of World Wind.
• 3D city updates: London’s Canary Wharf is also now available in Google’s 3D Warehouse, notes Digitally Distributed Environments. Vancouver has 3D buildings ready for your perusal, notes Google Earth Blog. (Note: Google Earth Mac beta has issues with Vancouver.) [Update 2006-07-23: La Défense in Paris is also available in the 3D Warehouse.]
• Speaking of Vancouver, GeoWeb 2006 is taking place there next week, July 24-28, and Google Earth CTO Michael Jones will be a keynote speaker.

For the Dutch speakers among you — Bright, a very hip paper magazine and website that perhaps best corresponds to a Dutch version of Wired, has a long feature article by David Lemereis on “The revolution of Google Earth”. There is also an additional how-to blog post with precise instructions and copious links.

This is easily the best big-picture article I’ve read to date about why Google Earth constitutes a sea change in how we can navigate information. And I don’t just think this because David interviewed me for the article :-) (in beleaguered Dutch — my tech vocab is resolutely in English). David “gets it”, but he also articulates why.