Import Cartographypoints to a segment on NPR about the USGS’s National Grid. This in turn prompts an “angry listener” post on DoRealTime, which asks, in part,
How can military and civilian emergency teams collaborate if they’re speaking different mapping languages? And why is GoogleEarth, who I would expect to be on the cutting edge of mapping technologies, NOT on a par with this free service over at USGS?
Because latitude and longitude are understood in New Orleans and Pakistan alike? Because in Google Earth you can roll your own layers if you want something? Because Google Earth is free and looking a gift horse in the mouth is unseemly?
(Find out how to read US National Grid spatial address here. Convert between USNG and lat/long using this PC application courtesy of the National Geodetic Survey, or a rather impressive-looking Corpscon 6, courtesy of the US Corps of Engineers.)
>Via Google Maps Mania, I am here!, a web app that lets you send an email with a dynamically produced KML placemark for any given latitude and longitude. Great if you’re travelling and don’t have Google Earth handy. And wouldn’t it be cool if positioning-enabled mobile phones had the ability to do this?
>Juice Analytics launches Absolutely Google Earth: “Our goal is to make this a great resource for anyone interested in looking for ways to make Google Earth Mash-ups and analytical tools.”
>Tim Beerman has an interesting read on his blog Interactive Earth about using Google Earth as an emergency response viewer. He’s also got plans for more complicated projects involving Google Earth, and promises to blog soon about “some work I have been involved with at the US Air Force Academy with automated vehicle location (AVL) and and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with streaming video into ArcMap and Google Earth.”
>An article from a recent issue of India’s RealPolitik magazine berates India’s leadership for their response to Google Earth. Most of the ground has been covered, but the following was new to me:
Not sure if this is viral marketing, unintentional or unauthorized, but over on Google Earth Hacks somebody has posted some excellent 3D architectural models of HCI bank’s buildings in Miami, Chicago and Hamburg, adding some boilerplate about HCI in the description.
If you’re going to turn on 3D buildings, then you might as well have these as well… which makes for an interesting advertising opportunity for companies with signature headquarters. It would even make good PR, being able to show potential clients directions to your office via a model in Google Earth downloadable from the corporate website.
From another perspective, this “donation” of 3D architecture to Google Earth is not at all surprising, if the application is meant to become an accurate virtual representation of the real world, over time. Companies should be dolling up “their” real-world equivalent spot, then, lest cybersquatters or protesters get there first with their own popular but unflattering renditions of HQs.
Ogle Earth is undergoing some design tweaks, so please excuse the rougher edges today and tomorrow. Behind it all lies a more modular system that should make it easier for me to keep the content on the right fresher. If you’re reading this in a news reader, come on over and have a look.
The look is pre-emptively optimised for Internet Explorer 7 and other browsers that can show transparent PNG files, while still looking okay in Internet Explorer 6. For now, Firefox is where it’s at.
On the to-do list: A linklist to non-English sites (which I’ve promised to several), A feed of GIS-tagged Connotea bookmarks, more social browsing linkage, an OPML reading list, and an anti-spam comment solution. Trackbacks could not be saved and had to be taken out the back and shot.
[Update 18.08 UTC: And I forgot to add: Some kind of categorization solution that works. Unfortunately, I am no fan of tags, but I might have to be.]
Don’t let the fact that some of this is in Hungarian throw you off: The AlertMap by Hungary’s National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications is a truly useful near real-time mashup for all the world’s disasters in all categories, from bird-flu to traffic accidents to hurricanes to biological disasters. I don’t remember seeing anything that has this combination of timeliness and breadth. It should be a newsdesk editor’s dream.
And, of course, they have output in KML. It’s not quite a network link, so I made one that you can access here (KMZ). But before you do, visit the Alertmap to get a good look at what’s on offer. Perhaps we could persuade them this would be extremely valuable in English as well?
>One thing that often stumps people the first time they dabble in serving KML and KMZ files from their own servers is setting things up correctly so that the browser knows what to do with the files. Google offers a hint here, but Welshman Barry Hunter spells it out for users of Apache. It turns out Barry keeps a very useful page with links to network links and overlays for Google Earth, many of them UK-centric.
>Alex of Ark’s Tech Blog wanted to go the other way, converting KML to GPX, and he explains how he did it.
>Slow news day at the UK’s Times Online: An article on how some travel agencies are incorporating images from Google Earth to show that beachside resort really means beachside.
Another week, another amazing application for Google Earth.
Declan actually reported on this in his article in Nature a few weeks ago, but the passing reference, well, passed me by: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is a prototype data portal that gives you access to an exhaustive database of taxonomies and where on Earth specimens of these species have been found. You can query the database for your favorite plant or animal and then you can plot the returned geographic “occurence data” on Google Earth, like so. The screenshot below is from a search for White Mustard and Bighorn sheep (for the record, not my favorite plant and animal):
But that’s not all: There is an easy-to-use tool to add your own coordinate data to Google Earth, links to detailed and dynamic topographic overlays for different regions around the world, and tools for creating 3D objects in Google Earth. The method used is quite nifty, involving dynamically created llinks inside Google Earth that take you to a web page where you can tweak away.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
Not sure if this is viral marketing, unintentional or unauthorized, but over on Google Earth Hacks somebody has posted some excellent 3D architectural models of HCI bank’s buildings in 
But that’s not all: There is an