• An impressive piece of sleuthing: Christoph Burgdorfer dates a Google Earth satellite image to within a 5-minute timeframe.
• 3DNature is working on using the new features in KML 2.1 to improve its export functionality. (Previously, Ogle Earth found fault with a workaround.)

The rest of this post falls victim to the demands of World Cup Football (i.e. follow Planet GeoSpatial to read it first):

• High Earth Orbit points out that GeoNames does reverse geocoding. In other words, coordinates go in, an address comes out.
• On Digitally Distributed Environments, Andrew Hudson-Smith notices accuracy problems when importing from SketchUp into Google Earth.
• Brian Flood reviews the possibilities of the new features in KML 2.1.

• It requires Windows, Google Earth, Internet Explorer 6 and ActiveX installed, but once you have those, You can run Google Earth inside the browser with a plugin. It works, it’s free to use, and it’s a surprising and impressive effect. It’s brought to you by Google Earth Airlines, and the code is easily embedded in any website (with instructions). You can also check out the source code, and there are links to examples. Wow. (No direct links as the site uses frames.)

  Caveats: The browser gets a bit confused if you open more than one window with a Google Earth display. You don’t have access to Google Earth’s sidebar. And it’s not a workaround for people without Google Earth, as you do have to have it installed.

  Google Earth Airlines also offers MovieBuilder4GE for free — for recording Google Earth sessions as an AVI. (I haven’t tested this.) (Via Google Earth Google Group)

• On the SketchUp Google group, wyrmdragon discovers that the latest release candidate of open-source 3D content creator Blender (2.42RC1) can import KMZ files saved from SketchUp natively. Once in Blender, you can export your models to many different formats, including those you need SketchUp Pro for to do natively.
• Mapz: A GIS Librarian posts My Powerful Geospatial Suite of Free GIS, a long list of free GIS tools. (Via Declan’s Connotea links)
• Davester fact-checks Google Earth by taking his own aerial imagery, and puts the comparison up on Flickr. The verdict? You can guess.
• In case you missed it, here is video of the Google Geo Developer Day presentations featuring Sergei, Larry, Eric, John Hanke, Michael Jones, Google Earth Blog‘s Frank Taylor and Google Maps Mania‘s Mike Pegg. It starts with some interesting strategizing by Google management. Definite must-see. (Via Google Earth Blog)

It’s past 2am on a Monday morning in Paris, and Géoportail is still not giving me maps. I’ve read somewhere (sorry, link lost) that it may take up to a week to muster the necessary resources, and/or that a password system may need to be introduced to limit access.

Meanwhile, Alexis Kartmann at Coma Informatique posts a link to the YouTube video of how Géoportail was introduced on the (French) news… The news footage shows a working 2D Géoportail, except that it’s not geoportail.fr, it’s the mapping application for the French yellow pages, made by Mappy, that Alexis has been working on since the start of the year. Alexis points out that while the imagery is IGN’s (the French government’s National Geographic Institute), the interface and backend are their own.

Yes, that’s right, the French yellow pages (Pages Jaunes, a publicly traded company) has the exact same image dataset as Géoportail, but you can go there now (click on the guy with the magnifying glass) and see all of France at 50cm resolution, with no ifs, ands or buts. Also, it has a cool smooth zooming feature. Ça alors!

Finally, a replacement for the now-defunct Geobloggers, and it’s called Geofeeder: An automatically refreshing network link in Google Earth for all the closest geotagged Flickr photos. Although it’s billed as an alpha, Geofeeder works great, and the people we have to thank are Planet 9 Studios, which provides 3D services to businesses.

(Those who have been around since the start of Ogle Earth will remember Dan Catt’s Geobloggers, a pioneer Google Maps mashup that mapped geotagged Flickr items and which served them to Google Earth. Geobloggers went away when Dan went to work at Yahoo!, and we’ve been waiting for a replacement.)

Planet 9 studios show their prowess by other means as well. This demo page links to a textured Transamerica tower in San Francisco, and the really adventurous types can try the 20MB-large textured neighborhood around the tower. (Mileage may vary, as Google Earth 4 is in beta, remember.)

France’s national mapping site Géoportail launched on Friday. French President Jacques Chirac made a speech on the occasion, covered by Reuters, in which he stressed the need for a national map site, though not for the sake of the consumer, curiously:

[…] Chirac stressed the need for France to have such a site […] saying the state had to be at the cutting edge of modern technology.

“It is also a case of economics,” Chirac was quoted by his office as saying […]

So Géoportail is great for the state, and for economics. Meanwhile, Géoportail has been down or dog slow for exactly as long as it’s been live, crushed by what an apologetic message on the site calls “several milion connections in a few hours” — probably pesky visitors encouraged by the main evening news to go check out their house.

Some free advice, then, to France’s National Geographic Institute (IGN), makers of Géoportail:

• If you have your president launch your website, you will definitely get lots of visitors.
• Don’t launch a generic 2D online map of France — what amounts to a stop-gap measure as you ready your 3D browser for later this year — and hype it in the international press as your response to Google Earth. People will be disappointed. Many of them will already have Google Earth. They know what it is.
• In sum, perhaps you should also have imitated Google’s habit of calling initial launches betas. Humility has the added benefit of lowering expectations.

Meanwhile, Google Earth’s latest data update shows many of France’s overseas island territories at a similar resolution as the 2 pixels per meter on Géoportail. If you live in rural European France, Géoportail will have better images than Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps or Microsoft Live Local… if you can get in. But for people living in French cities or French terittories overseas, try Google Earth first.

Wait, there’s more just in. Le Monde has a detailed article out today (in French) about the political mess this project has engendered behind the scenes. Some interesting points:

• Géoportail censors French strategic and military sites, which Le Monde has verified are visible in high detail in Google Earth. In other words, Géoportail is good for pinpointing which sites are worth taking a closer look at with Google Earth.
• The site was launched a week earlier than initially planned, to coincide with an announcement by three French ministers regarding an agreement about the future course of French GIS. Perhaps they wanted to go on vacation?
• IGN is not the only state entity involved in the Géoportail project — it is responsible for the imagery, but not for the other official layers that are mooted to eventually be available. IGN has nevertheless been speeding ahead with a 2D Géoportail without really consulting others. According to Le Monde, it considers Géoportail to be an excellent oportunity to sell more maps. The other partners — most notably the Office of Geological and Mineral Research (BRM) — see it more as a public platform to which they can publish their cadastral data, and resent IGN for its opportunism. Then there is also the problem of integrating all these data layers. Apparently, the necessary coöperation to make this happen hasn’t yet materialized. Nut graf (translated):
  

  It is as if the effect of Google Earth was to rekindle the ceaseless turf wars of French GIS, where everyone defends its borders by accusing neighbors of the blackest intentions. “I have never seen such an environment”, confided one participant of the interdepartmental meetings, which resulted in pressure to sign a cease-fire in the form of a charter signed in extremis.

• Still, the roadmap is clearer now: a 3D version of Géoportail in the autumn with some simple layers, and then an enhanced version, with “rich and varied” layers, in 2007.

(An aside: Curiously, Le Monde introduces Géoportail as an attempt by France to redress the relative scarcity of high resolution imagery of France in Google Earth — it talks of Géoportail restoring the “national honor”. I’m not sure if this is an official motivation for the site, or a journalistic flourish. If this was an actual concern, IGN could have donated the imagery to Google, though now that we know it’s censored, I’m not so sure if I’d want it.)

[Update 10:50 UTC: The International Herald Tribune today has an article with a great quote from IGN explaining the launch fiasco:

“It’s just temporary,” said Bernard Delbey, a spokesman for IGN. “We are surprised and proud of the interest people are showing in the Web site.”

On Friday, French President Jacques Chirac will inaugurate Géoportail, the much-hyped (in France) response to Google Earth. So maintains Pipilogue Pipologue, which together with another blogger was able to sneak in and post some screenshots.

All those screenshots show is a Google Maps clone. If that is the full product being launched tomorrow, I will be very underwhelmed, and Géoportail will have been quite the PR stunt. Other European countries have long had web-based high-resolution national mapping and imagery services — one fine example is the Swiss; the Swedes have at least two free ones. And all these are commercial ventures, not requiring a head of state to launch; France’s Géoportail is produced by the Institut Géographique National (IGN), a state entity.

IGN, meanwhile, has come in for some strong criticism in an article (in French) on a French GIS news site (Thanks, Declan!). Apparently, Géoportail is still being developed in an ongoing state of confusion about its intended goals — notably, there is still no agreement among different steering committees about how much data should be made free. All this is providing grist for a good old-fashioned turf war, reports the article.

AFP confirms the launch for Friday (minus the Chirac tidbit). Look for it at www.geoportail.fr. I won’t be able to, as I am soon off to an island in the Baltic, celebrating the national holiday of the summer solstice on Friday June 23 with lots of Swedes. In case you’re wondering, Swedes prefer 3-day weekends over pinpoint astronomical accuracy — druids everywhere are appalled.

Previous articles about Géoportail on Ogle Earth

• Two product updates of note:
  • KMLer, an ArcGIS 9 extension for exporting and importing KML, is now up to version 1.2 and supports KML 2.1’s levels-of-detail and region functionality. There’s a 7-day free trial version.
  • Photo georeferencing PC application RoboGeo is up to version 4.1. This is no mere point release, however. The most exciting new feature is the ability to associate live dictation or sound with images, and then to export the recording with the images to Google Earth, ready for playback. There are many other new features to read through. There is a demo available.
• GIS for Archaeology and CRM blogs and then links to a nice example of KML for archaeological outrach — the Sagalassos dig in Turkey.
• James Fee continues his preview screenshots of ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, the geobrowser whose public beta is due by the end of June. Today, the startup page. I’m not sure I’m as excited as James by the ability to skin the ArcGIS Explorer, though. Skinning is a superficial pursuit, pun intended.