• Tim Beermann is asking anyone who is interested in testing his Shape2Earth application to get in touch. Details on his site.
• Andrew Turner at High Earth Orbit is looking for some “cutting edge” users to beta-test his Google Calendar mashup. “Think Calendar and Traveling,” he hints.

• What a way to start the week — with Atlas Gloves, a DIY hand gesture user interface for Google Earth. It works exactly like the really fancy futuristic ones we’ve been seeing, except here you just need a webcam and two small lightpens in your hands to spin and zoom and scroll. There is demo video, which you’ll have to settle for in anticipation of the download and DIY instructions. It’s by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv, for the Tisch School of the Arts’ ITP Spring Show, held a few days ago.
• More art in Google Earth — Os Candangos (Google images) by pivnice on ZNO.
• Wolfgang Berberich, author of TrailRunner 1.0, a free route planning application for the Mac that exports to the iPod but also KML, is looking for volunteers to localize it. Any takers? (Wolfgang’s email is at the bottom of the page)
• A Belgian typographer is making a typeface out of buildings found in Google Earth… (Pics promised soon.)

Flickr geotagging tools for Firefox come and go as the Google Maps API gets updated. The one that seems to have gained most in popularity since last I checked in is .CK’s Google Maps in Flickr, GMiF — now onto version 4.0, which incorporates the Google Maps API 2.0.

What I like especially about this most recent update is that it exists as a plain-vanilla Firefox extension — there is no more need to have the Greasemonkey script engine installed, and updating is much simpler. Once you’ve installed it, why not try it out on this picture? (Like with previous versions of GMiF, you can use it to fly to Google Earth from within Flickr.)

I love sensor webs, and I love the fact that the USGS is making them accessible to us. Their latest effort from March: Real-time streamgages for the US, as a network link. Each dot represents a measuring station. Click on the link in the pop-up, and get detailed granular data.

Now you can watch droughts develop in real time across the US. (Via Rob Hetland’s web journal)

Little news and great spring weather in Sweden led to a slight lull in the pace of posting around here…

• Very Spatial has assembled a very long linklist to GIS software.
• YubaNet.com has a well-written article on crater chains that follows up on the discovery of craters using Google Earth a month or two ago.
• NASA World Wind is up to 1.3.5, geo extensions for SPARQL, a query language for RDF. He’s also written up an XSLT stylesheet that converts these results into KML. Leigh explains: “That allows you to ask questions such as “find points 10 kms from this location” and “test whether a point is within a bounding box”.

  This would be an excellent tool for newsreaders to adapt to generating proximity alerts from GeoRSS feeds.

• Kathryn Cramer writes that RISE-PAK, the rapid-response effort after the Pakistan Quake to which Global Connections contributed satellite data via Google Earth, has won the Stockholm Challenge 2006 award.
• Converjed notes another entry in the race for the enhanced displays we’ll be using a few years from now: Iowa State’s C6.

If you’re registered for O’Reilly’s Where 2.0, and you’re among the first 100 to register here (quickly now), you get to go to Google HQ, socialize and see presentations by Google’s Earth and Maps team on June 12, the day before Where 2.0 starts.

• Andrew Hallam at Digital Earth Weblog releases a new version of KML Adapter as open source. KML Adapter is a Java servlet that you put on a server somewhere, and which translates requests from Google Earth network links into a request for an ArcIMS server. This way, if you run an ArcIMS server, you can let Google Earth users get at the data. (Note that ArcIMS servers indexed on Mapdex are automatically made accessible to Google Earth.)
• Make: has images of a 3D printout of Columbus Circle in NYC, made from Google Earth’s buildings layer, using Eyebeam’s OpenGLExtractor.
• Pierre at Yakofon has already found a use for the RSS to GeoRSS converter. He notes that PubMed queries can be saved as RSS feeds, and so makes a georeferenced feed about bird flu. Of course, it works in Google Earth as well.