All posts by Stefan Geens

Opinion

Google Earth and Israel, cont.

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If you want proof of the harm irresponsible reporting can do, look no further than how the factual errors in the article in Globes about Israel and Google Earth (blogged two days ago) have metastatized into the belief that “Google Earth caves in to Israel”. Yes, the blog Battleangel takes [(updated) the mangled IsraelNN version of the article] at face value, adds a pinch of presuppositions, and arrives at that conclusion.

So, for the record, Israel isn’t strongarming Google, from the available evidence. Yes, it is indeed remarkable that a US law constrains US satellite operators on images of a sovereign state other than the US (and not for all US allies, but just one state), but if you want to complain, the proper target is the US congress and the executive, not Google.

If you want to accuse Google of being strongarmed by a state when it comes to satellite imagery (be it China, India, South Korea, or Israel), kindly provide some evidence first.

[Update 12:45 UTC: Another example of this meme spreading.]

[Update 12:49 UTC: IsraelNN manages to mangle the original news story even more. This version is truly remarkable.]

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Bird counting with Google Earth

Bootstrap Analysis, “chronicles and musings of an urban field ecologist,” posts a tutorial on using Google Earth to make accurate bird count circles for Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count in North America.

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Still more tidbits

1. Incredibly, this Mac application, MapMemo, hadn’t previously gained my attention. It does something very cleverly: it lets you drag files to locations on maps or charts to create aliases/shortcuts there, so that you can arrange and categorize your files spatially. A brilliant idea, with hindsight, and something to wish for in Google Earth, perhaps, as it turns the application into something more than a browser — it becomes a desktop companion. I especially like how it works seamlessly — no mussing with KML to get it to do its thing. (Via VerySpatial)

2. This is older, from June 29, 2005, but it’s a podcast of Google Earth General Manager John Hanke’s speech at the Where 2.0 conference. (Via Second Life Future Salon, which wonders when Google Earth will get avatars. Perhaps as an optional layer, so I don’t have to deal with them? :-)

3. Is Google Earth too good to be true? All Points Blog points to a report of a talk earlier this week by David Girouard, general manager at Google’s enterprise division, where it looks like he’s trying to say Google Earth is taking up a lot of computing power (surprise surprise), and that the company “has concerns about the future in all these respects.” All I’m going to say is that I’m not looking this particular gift stallion in the mouth. And monetize it already!

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Google Earth CTO Michael Jones’s GIS day talk, now on video.

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Google Earth CTO Michael Jones gave a lunchtime presentation at the University of California San Diego on GIS day on November 16, and now the 82-minute video has been posted to the web (151MB, mp4). There are some big ideas contained in this talk, as well as some intriguing hints of things to come in Google Earth.

The first 19 minutes are a tour of Google Earth, so skip those if you’ve used the application before. But then the talk gets interesting. One thing that Jones articulates very well here is the purpose of Google Earth; it’s worth stating verbatim: The mission of Google Earth is “not to show geographical information but to show the world information geographically.”

Listening to Jones, you do indeed get the sense that what he’s talking about is a lot broader than traditional GIS. He sees Google Earth as a tool, but turns that observation into a near-philosophical insight based on the ideas of the Dutchman and Economics Nobel prize winner Tjalling Koopmans. (Geeking with Greg has more quotes from this part. It’s worth watching the video to catch the nuances of these insights.)

(And you get to know some interesting things about Jones. He’s helped build the world’s highest resolution landscape camera. He likes to collect first editions of technical manuals. And he’ll make throwaway lines about quaternion inversion matrices, so one suspects he is a bit of a genius.)

During question time, he says some things that I believe are news:

“In a few weeks, you’ll see that the Google webcrawler will have found all the KML files in the world and set them on Google Earth.” (at 50:30 mins.) That hasn’t happened yet, so we can expect this any minute now:-) He also mentions Google Base as a way self-published data will be able to finds its way to Google Earth.

He also shows off a tool that he calls a time browser, and uses it to “scroll” through a dataset of place markers according to their time stamps, so that they are displayed in chronological order. I don’t believe that’s in the current publicly available beta.

More speculatively, he also said that it would be nice if oceans could be rendered in 3D as well, thus opening up Google Earth to sub-ocean mapping (at 54:00). Finally, he mentioned that Google Earth’s database gets rebuilt every month, and that this is when new data tends to get added. They have far more data than they show, apparently, but much more will come online in the next six months, Jones said.

(Via Paul Kedrosky’s infectuous greed)

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Google Earth tidbits (but good ones)

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1.Lawrence, Kansas is the center of the Earth. Or at least Google Earth. The town’s own paper has an absolutely charming article about how Lawrence is the town directly below your feet when you first fire up Google Earth.

2. A Canadian geography teacher lets Google Earth loose among his students and describes what happens.

3. A blog post hosted by the Belgian paper De Standaard reports (in Dutch) that in Greece, the military is not at all happy with the high resolution imagery of Athens that is publicly available in Google Earth. Apparently, they are upset that satellite imagery of Turkey is of lower resolution than that of Greece. I’m sure this problem could easily be fixed:-)

4. Google Earth and Maps are about to get their very own book, Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth, written by Martin Brown. (Via Let’s push things forward)

5. A Google Earth Community post reports that there is a location error for two locations in Russia. (I too have found that searching for Islamabad, Pakistan and Stockholm, Sweden leads to locations that are in-country, but not accurate at all.) Another user mentions that there is a data error reporting form for this sort of thing, with instructions.

6. Australian GIS company ER Mapper publishes layers of Landsat imagery of Australia from various years as a free KML network link, part of a demo of its web serving abilities.

7. Google Earth Hacks posts a network link that displays 38,000 geographically marked-up Wikipedia entries, the best 80 at a time in your current field of view. Pretty awesome way to surf and learn.

8. Wow, is the Times of India a one-note whining machine or what? And the paper has a tenuous relationship with the facts, especially if these get in the way of jingoistic pursuits (noted: Google Earth was launched June 28, 2005, not “almost 18 months ago”).