Here’s a quick update. I’ll be travelling the next few days, so posting may be intermittent. (In the meantime, I’ve updated the Ogle Earth link list.)

• SketchUpModels.com is a very nicely designed commercial repository of models, for sale at affordable prices. There’s also a gallery of very good free content. SketchUpModels uses the iTunes model of selling intellectual property, whereas the previously blogged Form Fonts uses an subscription model, a la Rhapsody.
• Mini meme: Not one, but two scouting blogs embrace SketchUp as a tool for developing camping furniture.
• Via The Stoa Consortium, Building a New Rome: The Imperial Colony of Pisidian Antioch, a website about the ancient city of Antioch accompanying an exhibition at the Kelsey Museum of Archeology in Michigan. There is an overlay for Google Earth, but as the site also contains 2D images of 3D flythroughs of Antioch, it would be even cooler to get that 3D file into Google Earth and let us do it ourselves.

Via Bull’s Rambles comes word of NASA’s press release for World Wind 1.3.5, aimed at drumming up some publicity. It contains some excellent actual news down in the fifth paragraph:

A version written in the Java computer language that will run on Macintosh and Linux computers is scheduled for release in September 2006, [program manager for World Wind at NASA Ames Patrick] Hogan noted.

That’s wonderful to hear, given that the porting project appeared to be dormant.

Two down, two to go: Will ESRI’s ArcGIS Explorer and Microsoft’s mooted 3D virtual globe run on Macs? I doubt ESRI will embrace the Mac. (As James Fee notes, it’s a .Net application, and porting it to anything else would likely be seen as a waste of resources by its core user community), but I think Microsoft doesn’t really have a choice if it wants to make its virtual globe a social, economically viable space. Not making a Mac version would be as silly as building a Windows-only online store. (Note that Second Life and World of Warcraft both have a Mac client.)

Followers of Apple news are used to hearing about the collaboration between Maine state schools and Apple Computer. Now Google is joining the fun, donating SketchUp Pro and Google Earth for pre-installation on the 36,000 Apple laptops that students will receive in the fall, as well to teachers. Here is the announcement on the official Google blog.

The best news: “Government agencies that would like to follow Maine’s lead are welcome to drop us a line at education@sketchup.com.”

Note: Those laptops will almost certainly be the MacBooks announced yesterday, rather than the discontinued iBooks mentioned in the RFP. And it’s not clear from the announcement whether it’s Google Earth or Google Earth Plus/Pro that is being installed — perhaps because the Mac version isn’t out yet.

[Update 8:50 UTC: One more thought: Feature-wise, there isn’t much that a schoolkid could benefit from in SketchUp Pro that is missing in SketchUp free (other than that it doesn’t exist yet for the Mac). The main reason I can think of for donating SketchUp Pro is the EULA of the free version, which might restrict use on school-owned laptops. In any case, AEC and CAD professionals should expect an onlsaught of designers from Maine in a decade or so:-)]

I’ve been experimenting with Google Notebook today at work, and I found it to be immediately useful in ways that complement my other web tools. (I’m a big user of and believer in data portability tools — I use .Mac, Basecamp, Backpack, Foxmarks (for shared bookmarks), Google Calendar, GMail and NewsGator (for shared RSS).)

It’s tempting, whenever Google introduces a new service, to add it to the grid of mashable services and see which squares haven’t been filled in yet. It can lead to formulaic blogging, and I’m guilty of it just yesterday (suggesting a mash-up of Google Trends and Google Earth.)

Having just said that, I’m now going to repeat the crime: If you can annotate the web with Notebook, why not use it to annotate Google Earth? Ah, you might reply, you can already do that, by adding placemarks. But that would be committing a category error, because placemarks are like network links, overlays or 3D objects — content published to Google Earth — and hence themselves something to be annotated, just like all content published to the web.

So imagine this scenario: In Google Earth, you find an interesting piece of architecture via the 3D Warehouse network link, so you right-click on it and choose “Note this (Google Notebook)”. Using Google’s built-in (PC only) web browser, Notebook shows you a georeferenced link to the model, and lets you add your notes. Later, you find a border or place name you want to annotate. Again, just right-click on it and comment away.

If you make your notes public, turning them into a web page, others can read your log, with links to Google Earth that recreate what you found. This has the added benefit of bringing more people into Google Earth who might otherwise not have ventured off the web.

• gps2geX is a Mac utility that takes your GPS position and maps it to Google Earth in real-time. Use it with gpsdX, an open-soruce GPS daemon that lets many applications use the same GPS data simultaneously. Both are written by Australia’s Robin Darroch, and get a great review here.
• A well-written article for CSO Online, “5 Ways Google is shaking the security world” has a section on Google Earth that is especially worth reading, and not just for chief security officers. Quote: “If your organization’s security plan is based on no one being able to obtain aerial or satellite photography of a facility, then it probably ain’t much of a plan.” (I found the entire article fascinating.)
• You can tag websites. You can tag physical places. So why not tag events? Austrian collaborative community site Shnitzl lets you do precisely that. And since events have to happen somewhere, venues are automatically mapped to Google Maps and Earth. There’s an RSS feed for every venue, as well as a global RSS feed, and same goes for Google Earth files. Shnitzl is still in beta — the events are for Vienna only, the RSS could use geoRSS tags and iCal format support would be nice — but this is solid Web 2.0 work. (Upcoming.org is a full-featured event tagger, but doesn’t fly you to Google Earth. And Shnitlz feels leaner, in a good single-minded-purpose kind of way.) (Via Google Earth Community)
• Google Earth Blog finds another (one-man) company offering Google Earth development services: Pierre Racine’s GeoWebService, de Québec.
• “CH2M HILL Enterprise Spatial Solutions Becomes the First Google Earth Certified Partner in the Google Enterprise Professional Program,” boasts a press release. Except that MetaCarta joined yesterday, and they sure use Google Earth too. Bummer.

• Over on Google Earth Community, further discussion of censored areas on Google Earth, both in the Netherlands and in New York State. It seems that prisons are proving to be a popular item to blur. Google Earth must be a popular pastime for prisoners, but if an aerial shot is all it takes to break out of Sing Sing, I’m not impressed:-) This page, maintained by PriceCollins, lists all found instances of censorship in Google Earth’s data set — currently at 63 areas. A wonderful resource for informed debate.
• Mac users of SketchUp pro need wait no longer: The plugin for Google Earth is now up. “This release brings the ability to post to & download from the new 3d Warehouse to OS X SketchUp Pro 5 users.” (Announcement). In anticipation of SketchUp for Mac Free, dowload the 8-hour time-limited pro version if you haven’t already.
• SketchUp3D.org is a new blog by a Milan-based design agency, and so far it has had some great short tutorials. Here’s how to make 3D text, and here’s how to make a floor texture for SketchUp with Photoshop.
• Since Mike Pegg mentions it over on Google Maps Mania, I guess it’s official:-) On Google’s Geo Developer day on June 12 (registration now closed), both Mike and Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog will be showcasing some of the most interesting mashups and network links of the past year.

In case anybody still thinks Google’s forays into GIS constitute a dilution of its primary mission, here are two items:

• Geographic intelligence provider MetaCarta announced today it is joining the Google Enterprise Professional program, in order to “integrate our technology with Google Earth Enterprise for use in the government, energy, and enterprise sectors.” Says Claudine Bianchi, MetaCarta’s VP of marketing:
  

  Companies and government agencies who use Google Earth can now extend the power of their searches using MetaCarta to view unstructured content such as content found in HTML pages, MS-Word, and email as search results on the Google Earth map interface.

  Here’s a slideshow with screenshots.

• Ed Parsons notes how Google Trends makes available to us geospatial “attention data” — letting us find out where a given search term is the most popular (as a percentage of total searches). This undescores that while Google is “all about search,” search is often geospatial in nature. In fact, before the web, that was the only kind of search there was:-)

Both the MetaCarta announcement and Ed’s post, read in short succession, suggest a natural Google mashup and hence feature request: Why not output Google Trends’s geospatial attention data as KML? This should produce a much more natural representation of the data. The KML could show relative popularity either via an overlay with color opacity, or else by some kind of 3D bar graph centered on each location.

Finally, here too a timeline would be handy — it would be interesting to see, for example, in which regions new memes are searched for first, or the regional reach of a marketing campaign over time.