You may have noticed the posting frequency has dropped precipitously here on Ogle Earth. That’s because the World Cup has been competing with GIS for my spare time — boy was it difficult to concentrate on GeoTagThings yesterday while England played Sweden. An additional challenge is that I’ve lived for a year or more in eight of the 32 countries partaking, so my frayed national loyalties are making for stressful viewing. I really am not a watcher of spectator sports, but I do allow myself this quadrennial spate of irrational exuberance.

Nevertheless, there is interesting news that touches on Google Earth about, so here’s another post that’s long on links and short on analysis.

• Development Seed Blog is working on a geocoding module for the Drupal CMS, and is looking for feedback. Support fort Google Earth is of course part of the plan. It’s interesting to see how the module allows for the possibility of multiple placemarks per post. Screenshot 1, 2. (Via Willy Dobbe).
• Zmarties looks at how Picasa communicates with Google Earth — basically, Picasa acts as a web server to Google Earth, which lets Google Earth send Picasa information via an updating network link. (See? No ActiveX required.)
• New releases: Version 2.2.0 of Ge-Graph by rsgrillo. KML 2.1 compatible, for Windows, with some very nice looking screenshots. Download here. Mmm, pretty:

  

• James Fee is such a tease when it comes to ArcGIS Explorer beta screenshots.
• Interesting tactical move: Microsoft’s Virtual Earth engineers are moving to embrace GeoRSS, probably because it isn’t KML:
  

  The VE team is very committed to providing great support for GeoRSS, both in our map control for display and data access, as well as tools for publishing your own GeoRSS feeds. Stay tuned for more on that in the future. […] If you’re a developer working with GeoRSS, or a publisher with ideas for tools to make your life easier, we’d love to hear from you.

  So soon we’ll have a situation where Virtual Earth can read and display just GeoRSS, while Google Maps can read and display just KML. I’d love to be able to paste a GeoRSS feed URL into Google Maps and have it display &mfash; it can’t be nearly as hard to do as it was for KML. Why not support both? They’re hardly competing formats.

• Track your kids live in Google Earth with the GlobalSat TR-101 GPS:
  

  Basically the TR-101 can send the exact position of your kids by SMS or by GPRS over the internet at any time, but it can also be used as a phone with the possibility to record up to 3 different telephone numbers.

• Frank at Google Earth Blog has a good way of making your hours spent in front of Google Earth pay: Find new surfing spots for prizes.
• Map and GIS News Blog for UK, Europe and World hits the radar.
• Standalone command-line shareware app csv2kml converts CSV files into KML.
• Leursism finds the first naked person in Google Earth that I am aware of. Either that or an alien.

There are web services that associate placenames with coordinates, like Tageo, GeoNames and Maplandia, and then make the placenames browsable by geographic criteria.

There are also web services that associate web URLs with coordinates, and then make these URLs browsable by geographic criteria: GeoURL was among the first, letting website authors add geotags to page headers, and then indexing these sites. A variation on this theme is the georeferencing of URLs created specifically for uploaded files of a certain type — Panoramio does this for photos, Freesound does it for recorded ambient sounds. Pin in the map, meanwhile, eschews findability for simplicity: Give it a coordinate pair, you get a URL back.

Tagzania is a more complicated beast. It lets you attach all sorts of metadata to a coordinate pair — tags, URLs (including of photos), a description — and this collection of associations is then too given a permalink URL. All tags and authors have their own KML and RSS feeds.

Now there is geotagthings.com. Where might it fit in? What’s so innovative about it?

For one thing, there is a change of emphasis vs. Tagzania. In Tagzania, you start with a location on the map, then attach a URL, if you like. In geotagthings, you start with the URL, then go to the map to georeference it. In this respect it is much like GeoURL, except that the work is done by users, rather than by authors. Geotagthings doesn’t do non-geospatial tags for URLs — del.icio.us already has that niche covered.

What’s innovative in geotagthings, however, is how it exploits the user-generated geotagging data: You can set up a feed that returns all most recent URLs georeferenced to within a specific geographic area — a circular catchment area with a user-set radius.

I’m looking forward to the day when newsfeed readers let me set up alerts for GeoRSS-enhanced content associated with specific geographic regions. Geotagthings.com, meanwhile, already offers the geographic equivalent to services I use today to find new stories for Ogle Earth: Just as I save searches for “KML”, “KMZ” and other terms in popular blog aggregators as news feeds, geotagthings.com lets me save searches for content associated with a specific region as a news feed. In my future newsfeed reader, geotagthings.com feeds will serve as a geographic safety net, just as my “KML” search term feeds ensure I don’t miss a relevant story if it isn’t covered by the blogs i follow.

This makes geotagthings.com an important new tool among the georeferencing services available online. But it’s still late-alpha-early-beta, so there is room for further polishing. Here are some suggestions from my own use:

• Yahoo! maps returns its map tiles too slowly, and in Europe the detail is very scarce compared to other ajax mapping services. Finding a place on the map takes too long.
• The feeds are still bit rough around the edges. I wish the feeds were clickable rather than just cut-and-pastable. In any case, Newsgator won’t accept them as they are, currently.
• How spam-resilient is geotagthings.com? GeoURL seems to have a lot of automatically generated content. I’m guessing geotagthings.com will be better insulated agains spam, as you need to register to contribute, and abusers would presumably have all their content removed along with their account, in one fell swoop.
• If geotagthings.com were to automaticaly use the information already found in GeoURL’s header geotags when adding a site via the bookmarklet, this would greatly speed up the process.
• Geotagthings.com’s feeds are created dynamically, from coordinate parameters in the feed’s URL. This means it would be trivial to return a KML file for a bounding box when updating a network link. This makes it possible to browse the geotagthings.com database by roaming Google Earth.

Overall, I think geotagthings,com can become a very useful service, depending on how often users find the time to geotag URLs they come across on the web.

(Via VerySpatial, GeoLibro and Slashgeo)

• Darryl Lyon’s Blog alerts me to a demo of what I consider to be something of a killer feature for virtual globes: “Video on terrain”, depicted rather persuasively with SkylineGlobe in this CNet online video from Where 2.0. Granted, SkylineGlobe isn’t out yet, and there is no way to know how scalable this feature is, but only two months ago, video painted onto 3D surfaces was high-end stuff for a media lab — witness GeoDec (third item from the top — and note who is sponsoring GeoDec; gotta love competition).
• Tim Beermann, maker of Shape2Earth (beta), writes a succinct “state of the geobrowsers” post worth reading, including the comments. (BTW, Shape2Earth works fine in Google Earth 4 (beta), according to one user.)
• I’m not sure if the network links ever did show the V70 sailing race in the North Sea live, but these snapshots on ZNO of the race in progress depict some very nifty sailboat model rendering work by ZNO that you can zoom onto. Mediality has more on the race itself.
• And the user-authored 3D-fication of Google’s Earth begins in earnest: Ciko does the buildings for downtown Jakarta (English text and link at the bottom of the post.)
• IntelliGolf 8.0 for PocketPC lets you use Google Earth to enter golf course information before you play on it.

GemGids.nl is an initiative by Dutch municipalities — still in the pilot phase — to make their geospatial information available to citizens via Google Earth. That much is laudable. Less so is their decision to use ActiveX controls to link the web component to Google Earth.

ActiveX is a Windows-only technology that, among other things, lets Windows web browsers control other Windows applications. This makes for great hacking and tinkering, and several clever tools have been written with it to control Google Earth. But it self-evidently doesn’t work for Mac and Linux versions of Google Earth.

That’s not a problem if you’re a hacker intent on pushing the envelope. Nor is it a problem if you’re a company making a business decision to focus on just the Windows market. But if you’re the public sector, then limiting your services to one endorsed operating system is just not on. We went through this phase in the late 1990s with proprietary technologies for web browsers — try it today and you’d get laughed out of the developers’ meeting… unless it’s held in Voorst municipality, obviously.

The problem with ActiveX is that it caters to programmers with specific skill sets, rather than to the needs of (taxpaying) users — and that’s a backwards way to develop a service. What’s more, there are perfectly good ways of retrieving personalized content for viewing in Google Earth without using ActiveX; as long ago as August 2005, Google Earth Hacks‘ Mickey showed with GEWar that network links with unique personalized URLs can achieve the same result. The more recent fancy-looking competitions that ran on Google Earth managed it as well.

A final irony is that one of the development partners, EGEM, says (in Dutch) it is responsible for assuring the project subscribes to open standards. I couldn’t agree more — I’m looking forward to the version that works with Firefox in Linux.

• David Hsieh has been hunting for large slogans on Chinese mountainsides. Churned through my Mac’s translator widget, I get “Overcomes all difficulties to strive for the victory”, “Only struggles from morning until evening”, “Serves for the people”, “Chairman Mao long live” and “The Shangrila – pine approves the forest temple” (a religious text, assures David).
• Good news for Mac users: The latest update of Brian Toth’s excellent Google Maps plugin for Address Book adds support for Google Earth and benefits from Google’s expanded geocoding for a bevy of European countries. The plugin is now a Universal binary to boot.

  

  This is what address books should look like by default. I might even begin to add people’s addresses to mine:-) (Via Faded Pictures)

• The Technology Liberation Front has a go at the Skyline patent suit vs. Google Earth, and finds it lacking. Not so fast, argues Daniel Markham. [Update 2006-06-18: Avi Bar-Ze’ev comments as well.]
• Maybe you already knew this, but I did not: Platial’s Today Nearby links its maps to Google Earth. The RSS could go GeoRSS, though. (Via Digg)

• Ooh, ah, a GeoRSS reader is coming soon to Google Earth. Andy Armstrong posted a picture to Flickr of his work for geofeed.org. My guess is that it’s a web service not unlike Newsgator that serves GeoRSS feeds as a network link to Google Earth. This ought to be very useful. (Nothing to see yet at geofeed.org. Or did he mean geofeed.net?)
• Phillip Holmstrand considers switching from Yahoo!’s geocoder to Google’s newly announced one for Batch Geocode, on account of the high daily limit (50,000 requests) and the fact that Google’s geocoder does several European countries.
• Ed Parsons again sums up neatly Where 2.0, day two.
• On GIS for Archaeology and CRM, Matt posts a tutorial on georeferencing with Picasa and Google Earth for archaeologists, using a dig in Pennsylavnia as an example. He throws in a use for SketchUp, for good measure.
• The Earth is Square has a preview of 3D buildings in NASA World Wind.
• Off-topic, but too cool not to mention: Sometime Google Earth activist Kathryn Cramer has been retained by Wolfram Research to run the Wolfram Science Conference Blog for NKS2006, How does one go about getting a job like that?

Quick quiz: Where else is geospatial data lurking on Google’s server farms, ready for visualizing in Google Earth? If you answered Google Analytics, you get a prize, and it’s the online Analytics2KML converter, developed by Jacob Cord.

I feel Ogle Earth is suffering a little from superlative-inflation of late, and I need to do something about it, but not until the next post: This converter is extremely cool, and works exactly as advertised. By way of example, here is a KMZ file of all the locations of all the georeferenced visits to Ogle Earth on June 14, 2006.

Jacob also posts the source code and a Linux binary here.

If Google were to do this instead of Jacob, they could automate the process, providing URLs to KML network links that update automatically — a little like how the personal iCal links work in Google Calendar. They could also prettify the visualization, for example by using sized 3D models to indicate the number of visitors from a location. Google is quite possibly already working on all this, as it is an obvious mashup candidate (with hindsight, okay), but if they’re not, I think I know somebody just right for the job:-)

[Update 00:02 2006-06-16: It just occurred to me to wonder where all this international geocoding was being done. It turns out it’s done by Google Analytics, and the coordinates are exported along with the rest of the data.]