For the third issue of the Google Librarian Newsletter, Google Earth team member and Keyhole co-founder Mark Aubin pens an article, Google Earth: From Space to Your Face…and Beyond, about the origins of Google Earth and how its imagery is collected.

Mark reveals that the inspiration behind Google Earth was…. the Charles and Ray Eames flip book Powers of Ten.

So now we have Keyhole co-founder John Hanke claiming the inspiration was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Google Earth CTO Michael Jones claiming the inspiration was the tricorder, and Mark Aubin claiming it was Powers of Ten. Get your stories straight, guys:-) (Via Aviran’s Place)

[BTW, here is a cool poster intended for librarians on using Google Search. Did you know that using a tilde (~) in front of a search term in Google will have Google search for all synonyms as well? I had no idea.]

Caught this on my way out the door to work:

This is a significant data move for Western Europe and worldwide placenames and borders

• large data move for Digital Globe’s coverage of Western Europe (!!)
• Paris, France – GeoInfo 5/2004
• Amsterdam, Assen, Houten, The Hague, Zeist, Wassenaar, Waterland – AeroData 2005
• Livingston County, New York – NYGIS 2005
• Columbia County, Orange, Rockland, Westchester,Sullivan, Ulster, Herkimer County, New York – NYGIS 2004
• Herkimer County, New York – NYGIS 2003
• Lawrence, Kansas – Digital Globe 4/2005, 1/2006 (a bit snowy)
• Google Earth Community layer March 24th update, improved presentation
• Antweb added to Community Showcase
• World placenames, borders, and island names – Europa Tech.
• Alternative language placenames (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English) – Europa Tech.

There is an absolutely fascinating post on Avi Bar-Ze’ev blog, Brownian Emotion. Avi, it turns out, was one of the co-founders of Keyhole, and one of the first software developers to work on what would become Google Earth. In his post, he is remarkably candid about the Skyline patent infringement suit against Google:

… [I]f their patent is so clever and Keyhole had actually copied any techniques, wouldn’t you expect Google Earth to perform as poorly (IMHO) as Skyline’s own software?

Ouch. (He goes on to call the suit “a mistake at best”.)

Avi’s expansive post covers some other interesting topics related to Keyhole’s early days. Here he talks about the deep internals of Google Earth:

People don’t often realize, but a lot of the ideas about geo-targeted advertising and dynamic content were planned out from the beginning. We deliberately built a 3D search engine inside the app, from day one, to sift through just about any kind of spatialized data with minimal overhead. In truth, GE is only superficially an “earth browser.” It’s actually very similar to Google’s massive search engine servers, but using spatial queries instead of keywords, with as much of the code and data residing on your computer as necessary to ensure the best interactive response. I imagine that’s the main reason Google bought the company, apart from the cool visuals.

Read Avi’s full post — there are many more such nuggets. (Standard web disclaimer: I don’t know Avi so can’t vouch for him, but Googling him brings up authoritative sites that lend plenty of credence to what he writes.)

It would seem that some people were busy programming over the Easter holidays:

• Brian Flood and his team have released a trial version of Arc2Earth, the pro application for turning ESRI ArcGIS-authored content into KML. No more excuses!
• Tim Beerman, meanwhile, is up to Beta2 for Shape2Earth, an open source GIS shapefile to KML converter. I don’t know if there are more beta testing spots available, but you can try via here.
• Also just updated: R.S.Grillo’s GE-Path, a free windows application that enhances paths made in Google Earth. (Note that installation is not straightforward.) Check out GE-Graph too, while you’re there.

Joining Planet Geospatial as a GIS blog aggregator: Geoblogger.eu, an initiative by Austria’s Christian Spanring. I’m not sure if it makes sense to section off English-language European bloggers (GIS knows no borders, right? And what happens when I move to Africa?) but it is certainly nice to be able to browse Spanish, German, French, Finnish and Dutch GIS blogs with one fell click of the mouse.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder has begun experimenting with KML as an alternate means of visually depicting data for their State of the Cryosphere (“Where the world is frozen”). The KMZ file is officially in beta, but is already a beautiful piece of work. It contains:

• An overlay with near real-time daily global ice concentration and snow extent.
• An overlay showing the extent of permafrost and ground-ice conditions in the northern hemisphere.
• A placemark collection of glaciers in the Americas and Europe.

The placemarks contain thumbnails that link to a database of amazing historical photographs of the glaciers, dating back all the way to 1896. You can even request extremely high-resolution TIFFs of some of these and they are freely usable if properly cited. (Unfortunately, a bug prevents image hyperlinking in the Mac (beta) Google Earth client, so Mac users need to get the images manually.) Here is a deep link to whet your appetite — the Forno glacier in 1896:

A subset of these placemarks contains paired images — one old and one new, taken from the exact same vantage point — so that you can see how far the glacier has receded in the intervening decades:

(Here are these pairs on the web, rather than on Google Earth.)

The big picture: If you’re a scientific research institute sitting on georeferenced content, converting it to KML and releasing it onto the web easily constitutes the biggest bang for your outreach buck.

Wow. This has to be the most exhaustive list yet of GIS resources on the web, thanks to the US Army Corps of Engineers. It needs to be trawled through at leisure. A shining example of US tax money doing good work:-)