The Webby Award winners have been announced, and Google Earth sweeps it, winning both categories for which it was nominated, twice each. Google Earth wins the “Broadband” Webby, and also the People’s Voice award for that category. And Google Earth snags the “Best Visual Design — Function” Webby, as well as the People’s Voice award there too.

Google Maps wins the “Services” Webby and People’s Voice Award, and also the People’s Voice award for “Best Practices“. (Flickr wins the Webby there). Congratulations to everyone involved — seven awards by one development team must be some kind of Webby record.

(And a special shout out to fellow expat Belgian Régine Debatty, the talented blogger behind We-make-money-not-art, which won the Webby for “Blog — Culture/Personal“.)

The Timoney Group has been responsible for groundbreaking demonstrations of Google Earth’s usefulness as an analytical tool — Envisioning Jonah Gas, South American Trade (a collaboration with Eicher-GIS) and now Gulf Impact.

In this interview with Brian Timoney, I ask him about what it means to be a Google Earth developer, why he uses open-source tools, what the strengths and weaknesses are of server-side processing, and whether SketchUp has a role in GIS.

Ogle Earth: In a few sentences, what did you do before Google Earth came along?

Brian Timoney: I come from a GIS background working in the environmental, petroleum, and military contracting fields. The primary impetus for starting my own business, interstingly enough, was as much organizational as technological. Specifically, there was a disjunct between the sophistication of the tools being used at the analytical level and the static output (99.9% of the time a paper map) being used at the decision-making level.

Continue reading Interview: Brian Timoney, Google Earth developer →

Brian Timoney and his group have released another impressive demonstration of Google Earth’s usefulness as an analysis tool — Gulf Impact: The energy impact of Rita and Katrina. It lets you upload a hurricane path in the Gulf of Mexico (or use the supplied path for Katrina or Rita), specify a impact zone of arbitrary size around it, and then have the server calculate the amount of oil and gas production that such a hurricane would affect inside this zone. All this is then rendered onto Google Earth, with plenty of additional static layers for context.

Brian explains it a lot better on his site, and in any case you really need to see this in action. Coming up next: An interview with Brian Timoney.

Last weekend saw the gathering of virtual-world luminaries at the Metaverse Roadmap summit. ZDNet covers it, as does 3pointD.

Plenty to read there. I just want to highlight something 3pointD’s Mark Wallace writes, so I can riff off it:-)

[…] You might navigate a context-sensitive avatar from one world to another, bringing with you reputation data and other assets, though your virtual form and abilities would change to suit the 3D environment you were entering. And all virtual worlds would be accessed via a near-universal 3D browser (much like Web pages are today).

The ability to link the web to virtual worlds has been possible for a while. For example, here is a link to Google Earth for Austin Hall, Cambridge. 3pointD offers a link to Austin Hall [Second Life link] in Second Life.

On a lark, I tried linking from one virtual world to another, by creating a placemark for Austin Hall in Google Earth that links to Austin Hall in Second Life. It works! (At least on my Mac, using an external browser.)

“Linking” in web parlance becomes “teleporting” in avatar-speak, but whatever you call it, you’re mapping from one virtual world to another, binding them closer together, and that’s a good thing, metaverse-wise:-)

What about mapping every point in one world to a unique point in another world? That would make sense if the worlds describe the same place, as do Google Earth and NASA World Wind. It would make less sense, but might still be fun, if the places are different but the geometries are the same: For example, both virtual Mars and virtual Earth are described by an elliptic geometry, so their coordinates can do double duty.

Virtual worlds that do not try to mirror the Earth or other globes do not need to adopt an elliptic geometry. Indeed, Second Life exists in Euclidian (flat) space, as does World of Warcraft. Variations on the theme exist: Arthur C. Clarke’s book Rendezvous with Rama describes a cylindrical world. Halo takes place on a ring world.

All this leaves plenty of room for metaversal innovation. Where is the virtual world described by hyperbolic geometry? How about building a community on the surface of a Klein bottle, or a Möbius strip? I’d sign up for it, even if just to figure out what such mathematical spaces “feel” like. The future universal 3D browsers mooted by the Metaverse Roadmap would need to be able to render these other geometries, however.

I think this is going to be the main attraction of virtual worlds over the real world: They don’t demand obeisance to the laws of physics, just the laws of mathematics, and even there you can decide the ground rules. I spend most of my time in Second Life and Google Earth flying around, for example, because I can.

Awesome. Over on Form Fonts 3D, 97 pieces of IKEA furniture ready to download, which you can then use to furnish your SketchUp dreamhouse (or student hell-hole). They’re yours to use if you pay the $11/month subscription fee.

You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this: IKEA should hire these designers to make a SketchUp version of every item in its catalogue, and have it available for download, free, from its online store. That way furnishing your house doesn’t become a guessing game with measuring tape. You simply fire up the SketchUp model (which you’re prepared earlier:-) and move furniture around at will until you like how it looks/fits. Perhaps a SketchUp plugin could keep financial tabs on your IKEA habit, and offer to place the order when you’re done.

But even if you’re not in the market for furniture, and just want something to populate your architectural flights of fancy, free virtual IKEA furniture would lead to plenty of placement ads at no cost to it, and even more mindshare. No Massive required.

The Radioactive Yak has discovered adwords in Google Earth again today, when searching for Wimbledon. Google was last seen testing adwords in Google Earth in mid-January.

I too could get ads for Wimbledon, and Wimbledon South, but not for any other search term I tried in Europe. The service it links to, checkmyfile.com, is relevant in that it offers credit reports by UK post code. (Via Search Engine Journal)

• Look, another local Google Earth blog: Google Earth CoolStuF is a Dutch blog focused mainly on local dynamically updated overlays, but European and global ones sneak in there as well.
• More collaborative geospatial authoring gets retrofitted with KML. Now it’s the turn of Urban Tapestries, a London-based “experimental software platform for knowledge mapping and sharing — public authoring.” The trial run from 2004 is now available as a KMZ file. It’s not unlike geotagged public SMS messages with personal impressions or photos. The nexr version, UT2, will include Google Earth support by default; this could turn into a popular form of microblogging.
• Finnish Web 2.0 thinker Jyri Engeström visits Tim O’Reilly, and reports that virtual worlds are very much on O’Reilly’s radar.
• Suddenly, not one, but two how-tos for exporting AutoDesk Civil 3D data to Google Earth.
• The Sierra Club gets ever more proficient in using Google Earth as a way of supporting its campaigns. Here’s Vancouver under water. (Previously blogged: Sierra Club does ANWR.)
• Excellent: Historic buildings are being recreated in SketchUp, ready for placement in Google earth. Here’s the lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the ancient wonders of the world, by Hidz. Perhaps 3D Warehouse’s metadata could already include a time attribute, in anticipation of the Google Earth timeline? (Via The Stoa Consortium)
• Over on Google Earth Community, a great collection of network links by various authors, made available as one download. This is a great resource for developers, but also for those building content. Do try it.