• Spanaut took lots of great pictures of Google’s Geo Developer Day and put them on Flickr.
• Mikel Maron’s GeoRSS talk at Where 2.0 is getting good airplay: O’Reilly Radar succinctly lists Mikel’s top four reasons for using GeoRSS:
  • Linking systems. (One more less thing to find agreement on)
  • Monitoring geographic wikis (like OpenStreetMap or Tagzania)
  • Syndicating sensor data
  • Tearing down the walls (through standardization)

  GeoRSS Blog links to Mikel’s PowerPoint presentation. Must read!

  BTW, considering how none of Google’s product announcements involved support for GeoRSS, did anybody ask a Google person about the company’s plans regarding the emerging standard?

• On Google Earth Community, notable developer rsgrillo discovers:
  

  The kml files generated by the new GE 4 uses a linefeed CHR(10) character to terminate a line.

  In the previous versions the lines were terminated by a carriage return CHR(13).

  If you’re a developer, read the rest.

• PenguinOpus nudges developers towards a wonderful new debugging feature — you can copy and paste KML between Google Earth and the clipboard. Valery35 spells it out in a comment:
  

  1. Select placemark, folder etc

  2. Copy to clipboard (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X)

  3. Paste into Notepad or other text editor (Ctrl+V)

  4. Change KML text. You can use Search+Replace, Undo etc commands.

  5. Select text and copy to clipboard. You can select part of text, if it correct KML

  &lt:folder>…&lt:/folder>, &lt:document>…&lt:/document> etc. If you copy KML with error, then it is simple not pasted.

  6. Paste into GE. Enjoy!

• Mapdex’s Jeremy wishes Google developers had some more GIS background. He explains.
• Another Where 2.0 KML-related press release: Media Machines announces KML2X3D, where X3D is an ISO standard for 3D computer graphics. (Too much going on right now for me to read up on this, but I will when Where 2.0 is over.) My hunch is that the support for X3D announced today, which dovetails Google’s embrace of COLLADA for textures in KML yesterday, is the beginning of far more game-like uses for Google Earth. (More on X3D)
• They announced it last week, but are announcing it again at Where 2.0, for good measure, or something: AutoDesk Civil 3D 2007 has an extension for exporting KML. At least it’s garnering a good blog review at Between the Poles.
• BTW, Anything GeoSpatial has been doing some great liveblogging of Where 2.0, in case you’re not there.

In the 18th-century exploration business, like in any other pursuit, there were winners and there were losers. Philip Carteret was definitely the latter. In 1766, as ambitious young British Navy Officer, he was given a shoddy ship, no support, and ordered into the Pacific. He managed to sail straight across it, prevailing over scurvy, thirst, and attacks by locals. He put a good number of islands on the map, and charted new routes that would later be used by British ships sailing for Australia and China.

So why isn’t he famous? Because of James Cook. Cook found Australia and New Zealand just as Carteret’s expedition was limping home. Cook would go on to become a British hero; Carteret managed to name a minuscule atoll after himself and was then laid off, soon to be forgotten.

I learned all this after chancing upon a back issue of New Scientist magazine while staying at a friend’s place. (2006-02-11, readable online, £2.95.) The punchline that forms the premise of the article is that after 350 years, Carteret is about to be forgotten all over again. The atoll he named after himself, now part of Papua New Guinea, is about to disappear, washed away by a rising ocean. Its 1,000 inhabitants wil be relocated to nearby Bougainville Island by 2015, when Carteret Atoll is expected to be submerged completely.

News of these “first climate change refugees” has been covered by the press for a while. A 2001 Straits Times article calls the disappearing atoll a “dress rehearsal for global warming.” A Guardian article from November 2005 documents the plight of the islanders, and the decision to move them.

I read the New Scientist article yesterday in the wake of last week’s massive Google Earth dataset update, and wondered if the atoll might not now be having one final high-resolution curtain call before being swallowed up whole by the sea.

I first had to find Carteret Atoll. Wikipedia helped immediately: There are two articles (Carteret Islands, Carteret Atoll), the first with coordinates. A visual check on OceanDots.com confirmed that the atoll at that location is indeed Carteret’s discovery.

Image credit: DigitalGlobe in Google Earth

Luckily for this blog post, the latest update reveals the atoll in glorious high resolution. In fact, the resolution is so good that you can make out individual palm fronds. There are six inhabited islands dotted along a ringlike coral reef — only the largest settlement is named in Google Earth: Weiteli, on Han Island. (The Guardian reports that Han was completely indundated by a storm surge in 1995. Another island broke into two.)

Is climate change the cause of Carteret Atoll’s disappearing act? Probably yes, though Wikipedia lists two alternate theories: overfishing with dynamite, and tectonic plate shifts in a region where the Earth’s crust is disappearing.

Here is a KML file with the islands. Here is the same KML file in Google Maps, because we can:-) It also shows you what the dataset was like before last Thursday. Bonus: A portfolio of B&W photos taken on the Carteret Atoll in 1960, from the National Library of Australia.

Much of the mainstream news about Google Geo Developer Day just rewrote the press release. But this was different:

Search Engine Watch‘s Greg Sterling writes a long post, from the perspective of a GIS outsider at Google’s Geo Developer Day:

The level of enthusiasm from developers in the room yesterday was very interesting to observe. Speakers were interrupted by loud applause several times in response to various techical statements. Such remarks and the response to them were generally lost on me until their significance was explained in English. It was at times a little like being in a foreign film without subtitles.

:-)

And via 3pointD, a post about the ($10,000 per year) enterprise version of Google Maps, on the Official Google Enterprise Blog.

Wow, that was fast. Over on Random Notes, Jason Birch has written a WMS-to-KML reflector script (in PHP) that takes advantage of KML 2.1’s nested regions feature. He puts up the source code, and examples too. No rest for the geeks.

• Here’s what Google Earth looks like on Linux, thanks to Dexae and Flickr.
• GeoServer “is a fully functional WFS-T and WMS server that follows the OGC open standards.” Version 1.3.1, just out, has enhanced support for KML, and there is a built-in reflector script to serve WMS data to a network link.
• Tagzania Blog identifies the exact location in Iraq where the Haditha incident occurred, based on high resolution images in Time magazine.
• Both The Earth is Square and Bull’s Rambles point to new high resolution imagery layers of the US for NASA World Wind.

• Here’s the Google Earth KML 2.1 Tutorial. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about KML 2.1 since a few hours ago.
• And here’s the KML 2.1 Specification.
• Frank at Google Earth Blog points out that the National Geographic Layer now contains plenty of placemarks over North America, not just Africa.

  

• Remember that Google Earth 4.0 is _beta_. After some heavy use, my copy started to crash repeatedly as I zoomed over a specific region. Trashing the settings file didn’t help. Trashing the cache file did.

…And the news just comes on flooding in:

Skyline Software Systems is denied a preliminary injunction to stop Google from distributing Google Earth, reports ZDNet.

U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock on Friday denied a preliminary injunction requested by a Virginia-based company called Skyline Software Systems, which alleges that Google Earth violates its terrain-mapping patent.

A notice posted on the court’s Web site says that Woodlock announced his decision in a telephone conference with attorneys involved in the case without publishing a written opinion.

Previously about Skyline:

Keyhole co-founder disses Skyline suit

Skyline press release dated April 4