This weekend’s trip through the archives to trawl up the gems for the expanded right column (now that it’s easy to do) brought to light a couple of sites that have improved since the last visit:

• German site Geokoordinaten für Google Earth is a directory service for finding and mapping places to Google Earth, but with a unique twist: Choose a country and then enter some search text. This web app will return a KMZ for Google Earth with all the placenames starting with that text. For Example, search for “ber” in Germany and you will get 1185 places returned for opening Google Earth, just one of them Berlin. Each placemark has a link to Wikipedia, whether or not the article exists. Somewhat useless, but lots of fun.
• FBOweb.com made quite an impact when they began offering live flight tracking of commerical airlines in Google Earth. They have a pay service, but now they have also expanded their free offerings to include live plots for inbound traffic to seven US airports. Most impressive to me are some cool overlays they’ve added: A massive 3D layer showing Special Use Airspace around US airports, and an excellent network link to detailed sectional maps for pilots covering the entire US.

Eyecandy?

A year ago I never thought I’d be staring at something like this on my desktop for free. Long live the march of technology.

Do check out the lists on the right, at your convenience. If you think I’ve missed something obvious or know of something new to add (or see a mistake) email me or leave a comment.

At least from Sweden, Google appears to be down, with no access to Google Earth’s servers, Google Search, Google Maps and Google Adsense. Anyone else seeing the same? All other sites work from here.

As a result, all web apps using Google Local’s API are down too, of course:-) Did somebody just write something about the vulnerability of mashups?

[Update 13:52 UTC: Belgium gets Google fine, so it must be a Swedish thing.]

[Update 14:35 UTC: Back up. Comments confirm something was amiss.]

[Update 14:56 UTC: Not back up for everyone in Sweden, though. Writes a Swedish hacker friend: “From what I can see it seems like a routing problem to some of the servers and nameservers. For example ns1, n3, and ns4 are not responding while ns2.google.com is… Considering that it seems to work in other countries it’s most likely a routing problem.”]

Adding location metadata to photos is perhaps the surprise hit of 2005’s mass mapping revolution, bestowing immediate benefits in terms of context and display options. For many people using Flickr or similar tools, coming across geotagged, mapped photos may well have been their first conscious encounter with GIS.

Two new tools are helping to forge the connection between a photograph and where it was taken. Both integrate with Google Earth.

ITag

For Windows users, ITag turns adding location metadata into a matter of dragging and dropping a Google Earth placemark onto the photograph. This data can then be saved in a Flickr-compatible format for uploading to that service, or else one or more photographs can exported in a group as a KMZ file and sent to people for opening in Google Earth. (example (KMZ))

Finally, ITag will also convert GPX tracklogs made by GPS devices into KML. It’s free, so there is no reason not to try it, in case this is what you need.

Photo Map

This open source project is an elaborate Firefox browser extension. The aim is “to build a better map” by tagging (panoramic) photos in Flickr or 23 with more detailed metadata (point of view, type, season, time of day…) and then displaying them on Google Local as an enhanced map. You can also launch Google Earth from the interface with a network link that shows the photographs in that context.

The project is in its incipient phase, in need of (your?) content, but it is even worth playing with just as a proof of concept.

> Earthbooker.com, which lets you use Google Earth find hotels, has a press release out touting its increasing popularity. The site gets an average of 1 million page views a day, according to the press release, though it’s not clear if this number includes refreshes of its network links. The company behind Earthbooker, GlobeAssistant, continues to refer to a “patented technique” for the coding delivering its network links — considering the time it takes to get an actual patent, I suspect that is more marketingese than a term of art. If it isn’t I’d love to find a reference (I have looked).

> A $40 GPS logger that outputs to a KML file on an SD memory card, via Make blog. Unfortunately, it’s $75 short of actually working. I want this in my next iPod.

> Tim Beerman of Interactive Earth walks us through the minutiae of building an open-source Shapefile-to-KML converter.

Instead of waiting for Google to come out with the time browser, developers at Creare Inc have made their own prototype, the “TimeDrive“. The trick is to split up a large set of data into time-delimited slices, and then let you decide via a control panel on a separate website which slice is sent to a constantly updating network link in your Google Earth. The prototype uses Declan’s avian flu dataset, and it works as advertised. Very innovative indeed.

Matt Miller at Creare says their solution can be applied on demand to KML documents that contain time data; TimeDrive will even aggregate multiple documents. But the best may be yet to come:

We also are working on TimeDrive interfaces to recorded webcam image overlays, e.g. fly-through actual imagery of Times Square in both time and space.

(Via Declan’s Connotea GIS bookmarks)

Sorry about the cheesy headline, but when a mining company decides to publicize a gold find by putting all the relevant GIS data into Google Earth, that’s what you do.

Kimber Resources is a gold and silver mining company in the Mexican Sierra Madre, and drill results on their Monterde property have indeed returned gold. (Witness the hike in their share price today). Here is the page with screenshots and the KMZ link, and here are some I made myself:

Click on individual icons to get drill results for that spot. Now, you no longer need to rely on the company’s own conclusions about the viability of a site — make up your own mind from the raw data.

Previously, Brian Timoney has helped companies visualize their geospatial data in Google Earth, notably with Jonah Gas. Kimber’s efforts are very much in the same vein (terrible pun intended). Do two instances make a trend in corporate communications? My guess is that soon, companies which don’t offer this level of granularity in their data to investors are going to be penalized for their opacity to the market.