• A quick and dirty way to generate higher resolution background meshes from Google Earth when positioning SketchUp models for export to KML. (Note, the Mac version of the KML exporter works differently for me, and is still a bit too buggy for mainstream use.)
• Cartography points to another use of Google Earth in the service of environmentalism — Greenpeace outlines all the world’s intact forest landscapes. In ESRI Shapefiles too.
• We knew Keyhole got funding from In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm, before Google bought it. A Slashgeo commenter notes that @Last, makers of SketchUp, got the same treatment, as blogged by All Points Blog, who runs by some more names funded by In-Q-Tel. Randall Newton at AECNews.com points to a long list of past In-Q-Tel investments.
• Alan Glennon at Geography 2.0 raises some very interesting points about the pitfalls of having too much data, in the context of Declan’s article about sensor webs in Nature. Often, the hardest part is deciding what data to ignore, and the more data you have, the harder it gets.
• Directions Magazine‘s Adena Schutzberg and Joe Francica divine the future of the nature of the competition between Google and Microsoft. Conclusion: “We are just a short hop away from a major disruption in the geospatial market.”
• Alan Glennon perseveres through an LA Times article with little to commend it to find a nugget of Microsoft news at the end that is worth a mention: “[Steven Lawler, general manager of Windows Live Local] said that these [bird’s-eye] views covered areas where about 20% of the U.S. population resided and that it would be up to about 90% in two years.” (Thanks Alan)
• Glenn at GISuser laments how websites will use any excuse to put “Google Earth” in headlines in order to garner more traffic. Like this very post, for example.

Following up on the post of the release of the latest version of KMLImporter for NASA World Wind, author ShockFire writes in:

Yesterday it has also been decided that KMLImporter will be included in WorldWind v1.3.4, so I’ll likely release several updates soon to reach a final (stable) version before the release.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our HTML of geobrowsers. It was as good as given before, but now it’s official: The three largest geobrowsers — ESRI ArcGIS Explorer (upcoming), NASA World Wind and of course Google Earth will all have KML support by mid-year, including support for network links. For the sake of the child nodes, let’s hope these implementations all treat KML the same way.

Such a big topic, so little time…

Science journalist Declan Butler has a post up announcing a special issue of Nature, with free access to articles focusing on the future of computing. It’s a long and absorbing read, and a quick blog post like this one won’t do it justice. Declan gets to write about the “sensor web” in 2020 computing: Everything, everywhere:

These new computers would take the form of networks of sensors with data-processing and transmission facilities built in. Millions or billions of tiny computers — called ‘motes’, ‘nodes’ or ‘pods’ — would be embedded into the fabric of the real world. They would act in concert, sharing the data that each of them gathers so as to process them into meaningful digital representations of the world.

How best to represent this data meaningfully? Why, on a virtual Earth, of course. Here’s an actual working example (via Declan’s post), a project in the James Reserve, California. The KMZ file available on the site gives you access to live data from a hundred odd sensors scattered around a valley. This is a groundbreaking use of Google Earth (first I’ve seen, in any case), but it is also a taste of things to come. Not much I can add other than point to it, so go play and imagine this applied to urban environments, in industrial spaces, for search and rescue, for livestock management, for border control…

How might all this information be distributed? Check out this page outlining the idea of the “Information Commons” (Declan, again). The Information Commons posits a peer-to-peer approach for these myriad datapoints — interconnected stores of data that do not attempt to impose hierarchies on one another. While the idea would face challenges similar to those of P2P networks today (scaling costs, data irregularities, sourcing questions), such problems are being solved on today’s P2P networks.

Still, this would just mean that an inordinate amount of georeferenced data becomes available to the user. How to forge some kind of order from of this complexity? Well, that sounds like just the job for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!…

• One more Australian billboard turned into hovering car written about by mainstream media.
• A skeptical view of the SketchUp purchase. I disagree, but at least architect Matt Stachoni doesn’t pull his punches.

Astute reader Ron Schott writes in about Yahoo!’s foray into gotagging: Zonetag Photos, “a research prototype release from Yahoo! Research Berkeley”.

Is this what Dan Catt has been up to recently? Ron does some digging and finds Dan in the Zonetag Flickr group, so we’ll assume yes. (Before Dan went to work at Yahoo!, he was responsible for Geobloggers, which mapped geotagged Flickr photos onto Google Earth.)

What is Zonetag? It’s not a mapping solution per se, but a mobile publishing tool for cell phone cameras that incorporates an automatic geotagger. In English: It will let you upload your cell phone photos to your Flickr account via your phone and automatically tag the photos with the ID of the cell phone tower you’re using.

As soon as somebody in the Flickr photo community associates that cell phone tower ID tag with a ZIP code or city location tag, all photos with that tower ID will then be linked to the area in which you took them.

The service is experimental and works in the US only, with Nokia Series 60 phones. Here is an example of a “celltagged” Flickr Photo, with a ZIP code tag attached. Here are all 1968 zonetagged photos to date.

Implications for mapping & Google Earth? These photos aren’t nearly as precisely positioned as longitude/latitude tags generated by GPS-based devices, and will likely be scrunched up at one location for multiple cell towers if many are displayed on a map. We’ll see if that proves to be “good enough” for mainstream use, given the ease of publishing to Flickr. I suspect people will expect more precise positioning when zooming in close with Google Earth.

• ShockFire of Shock’s News Network posts a new version of his (her?) KMLImporter for NASA World Wind, which now works for periodically updating network links (he says — and I need a PC to check such things).

  While we’re on the topic, Geography 2.0 points to World Wind’s development road map: By next month, we should see some cool new features that will keep Google Earth on its toes. And by October, multiplatform support through in-browser viewing! In other words, NASA World Wind should be running on my Mac using Java before the year is out.

• Le Blogue du CFM de Guadalajara finds another GPX-to-KML converter, GoogleEarthTweaker. Drag and drop geocaching.com “pocket queries” into it, and get nice KML back.

Blender is a free open-source multi-platform 3D modeling application. Ynniv of A life of Coding has now written a python script that exports Blender’s content as KML. The learning curve for Blender might be steeper than for SketchUp’s, but the price certainly isn’t.