The BBC reports that for the first time, the location of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin has been officially identified and marked with an information panel. This is the place where Hitler killed himself, in April 1945.

The bunker lies around 200 meters from the Holocaust Memorial, beneath a parking lot outside some apartment buildings. What’s frustrating about the BBC’s reporting, however, is that this particular story screams out for georeferencing, and yet there is not a marker or link to a map anywhere. These days, news organizations really should be able to call upon geospatial resources at will. Understandably, this information might need to be collected by the journalist in the field, but how much extra effort does it take to capture GPS coordinates for a story and send them along when you file it?

In any case, taking into consideration the information provided by the article, the photo that accompanies it, the pictures on this site about Hitler’s bunker and the high resolution images of Berlin in Google Earth, it’s possible to triangulate the position to precisely here.

The most recent Google Earth dataset update (see previous post) includes a good chunk of South Georgia, including Stromness bay and Grytviken, where favorite explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton lies buried. (Turn on the Google Earth Community layer in Google Earth for links to photos.) This new update also provides new context to one of my all-time favorite KMZ files: the georeferenced account of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 expedition.

On a side note: Now that very accurate imagery has replaced the base layer for a portion of South Georgia, Google Earth Community (GEC) placemarks in the region are not as precise as they could be. One possible way of helping these placemarks become more accurate is to let authors reposition them inside Google Earth, just as we do with our personal placemarks.

Such a solution would likely take some heavy lifting by Google behind the scenes, however, though it would turn the posting-to-GEC process much more into something like a geospatial public Google Notebook. Imagine a way of toggling your Google Earth placemarks between private, public, and “for GEC”, with people being able to subscribe to your public ones. That would turn Google Earth into quite the collaborative tool.

Google Earth has received a major dataset upgrade overnight. The entire globe is now marked with new strips of high resolution imagery, much of it in regions with low population densities. This is without a doubt the single largest high-resolution update yet, in terms of surface area.

Large desert areas in Africa are now in high resolution, including the Nile region and the entire soutwest African coastline. Many parts of Tibet, Nepal, India and Pakistan have been upgraded, including the Karakoram and the Himalayas. Large tracts of Siberia have been upgraded, as has the interior of Australia. Ditto with Mexico — especially the Baja peninsula — and much of Central America’s coastlines. It’s as if Google went to DigitalGlobe and said, “What’s left that we don’t have yet? Can we make a deal?”

Craig Stanton emailed to point out much higher resolutions in New Zealand. Google Earth Blog notes that many islands have had their imagery upgraded.

Notably, too, large parts of Israel are now in high resolution, Including the Dimona nuclear site. [My bad: The base – not the town – is in a low resolution area to the southeast.]

High resolution imagery of remote areas is directly useful for science projects, but also for humanitarian agencies — in short, anyone who wants to do more than look at urban landscapes (interesting as they are).

The database changes have not made it to Google Maps yet. Google hasn’t yet announced the update on Google Earth Community.

• Google Earth CTO Michael Jones will be speaking at the Emerce eDay conference, in Rotterdam on September 14. (Emerce eDay is about trends in digital business and marketing.) Ben Hammersley will be there too, I see. We had him at Bloggforum last November, and he’s quite the entertainer.
• Obvious as soon as you read it: James Fee suggests that realtors make SketchUp models of the houses they are trying to sell, to create buzz. In the comments, it’s clear Zillow is listening.
• India’s president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam again indicates he wants control over satellite imagery of his country. He told the All India Police Science Congress they need to come up with “viable solutions to help the government in framing laws to check the display of such pictures.”
• Seems like lawyers are finding good uses for Google Earth. Here is one user’s rave testimonial.
• ShockFire has been accepted to the Summer of Code with a very interesting proposal: A student-teacher interaction plugin for NASA World Wind:
  

  […] a teacher can choose a mode which will dictate how clients behave. By default a ‘joint goto’ mode will be active, meaning all clients will go to wherever the host goes. The teacher can then decide to switch to a ‘free roam’ mode to have all clients move individually. An extension of this mode is the ‘find the spot’ mode where clients can move around freely but are supposed to move to a specific spot on the planet. This mode will use feedback to let the teacher know which students have completed the objective and which haven’t. Of course many more modes can be implemented, such as giving control to a student or having students complete objectives in teams.

• ClueTrust‘s wonderfully straighforward Mac GPS downloader LoadMyTracks gets an update, with wider device compatibility.
• There are updated scripts for importing KML into open source 3D authoring tool Blender.
• Adena at All Points Blog makes a good point about how Google’s spreadsheet program might facilitate the making of mashups. In case you need this functionality now, however, you can convert spreadsheets to KML and Maps using GPS Visualizer.

Interesting news: Panoramio developer Eduardo Manchón writes on his blog that, (translating from Spanish):

A few months ago [co-developer] Joaquin Cuenca and I met Google’s John Hanke in Madrid at Google’s offices. We had talked before, when Google put the Panoramio KML feed on Google Earth’s download page.

John liked Panoramio; he proposed hosting Panoramio on Google servers, and some other thing that can help us with the project. He also asked us to participate in Where 2.0 and Google’s Geo Developer Day, and we will.

Eduardo goes on to note that Google is helping many Google Maps mashups, and that John Hanke is a wonderful guy:-) (As an aside, he also notes that Tagzania has been doing well vs. Platial in terms of popularity. An Alexa chart does indeed suggest Tagzania has more staying power, and I think that’s entirely deserved.)

What’s the big picture here? This news further highlights the different strategies Microsoft and Google are employing to encourage the use of their map products. With the latest version of Microsoft Virtual Earth, Microsoft implemented a very slick home-grown system for collecting and sharing placemarks. Google, on the other hand, is putting its trust in the personal initiative of a legion of developers that use its KML and Google Maps API, and then encouraging the best of the breed.

Each company is probably employing the best strategy, given its position: Microsoft was second to the API party, and until recently, a lack of international data prevented uptake by the non-US world (witness the nationalities of the developers of Tagzania and Panoramio). It therefore makes sense for Microsoft to develop top-notch map-based tools in-house. Google, on the other hands, has seen a large developer ecosystem take root arounds its API, and it is obviously far better for Google to water it than to try to compete. (Pardon the mixed metaphor.)

Additionally, I’d speculate that hosting Panoramio on Google servers also facilitates the “capturing” of Panoramio’s semantically enhanced content — Google’s preferred kind of content, as I’ve blogged here.

Jerry Paffendorf comments on the Metaverse 2.0 post:

[…] I’ve been banging the metaverse and Second Life meets Google Earth drum for a while and have the opportunity to talk about it at Where 2.0 coming up real soon. The talk is called “Second Life and Google Earth Mashups: Virtual Worlds Meet Geospace.” Great discussion here. It’s all going in the talk! :) Now I’m perfectly happy to be your avatar for that, ha, so speak through me. What else do you think I should be saying there?

One thing that occured to me is that while we know exactly what the Earth looks like, we are still a long way off from knowing what the best of all possible virtual worlds is, from a user perspective. Though we may not know what the answer is yet, we are definitely beginning to agree on the questions we need to ask in order to find out.

[In the rest of the post I list some of those questions that have been asked recently, and ask whether the answers might not depend on personal preferences.]

Continue reading MyMetaverse →

The confirmation emails sent to participants at Google’s Geo Developer Day on June 12 contain this tidbit on the agenda, right after lunch:

1:00 – 2:30 Launch
We’ve got a few things up our sleeve, and you’ll be the first to see.

Ninety minutes of launching implies a pretty big sleeve. Any suggestions as to what might be launched? I have no insider info, but am guessing that the Mac version will come out of beta and get a Plus and Pro version, SketchUp free for Mac will be released, and that Google Earth will get some of the improvements wished for here.