gmaps2kml is a simple site that does exactly what it promises: Turn your view inside Google Maps into a KML placemark ready for Google Earth.
(Recap: Another option is this KML generator. If all you want to do is switch views from Google Maps to Google Earth, I recommend MutantMaps for Firefox browsers. There is also a manual converter between the two.)
[Update 2005-08-01, 10:27 UTC: Please note a comment left by Earthhopper, who thankfully speaks Japanese, and who thus was able to understand that, in addition to the page above, there is also a bookmarklet that can be used with Google Maps to put a placemark in Google Earth. The great thing is that this works with most browsers, not just Firefox. So read the comments.]
There is something new: a globe about the size of grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes… It’s a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that the CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns — all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.
If he were in some normal, stable part of the world, like lower Manhattan, this would actually work in 3-D. Instead, he’s got to put up with two-dimensional satellite imagery.
Companies that make science fiction real are my favorite kinds of companies.
Exhaustive latitude, longitude and altitude information for all the Earth’s cities and towns, sorted by country and alphabetically.
You can drill down to an individual page for each place to find a topographic map, nearby cities, towns and airports, and recent temperature, cloud cover and precipitation.
It links to a Google search, not Google Maps or Earth (yet), but even so is a valuable resource.
GeoTagging Flickr is a Flickr group for discussing all things related to putting geotags onto Flickr pictures. The group also has a linklist to useful geotagging tools.
(Recap: Google Earth will show geotagged Flickr images if you subscribe to the geobloggers network link. More about this here.)
The New Zealand Herald reports on how a Google Earth Community thread helped uncover the identity of a large spiral discovered on New Zealand farmland using Google Earth.
The spiral turns out to be a work of art by Virginia King, and it is rather fetching:
I’m adding it and future placemarks of interest to this blog to Ogle Earth’s Tagzania feed, which you can add as a dynamic network link to Google Earth here.
If I didn’t need sleep, I’d be spending more time on these two Google Earth holy grails:
1) Write a plugin or Greasemonkey script that automatically detects whether a web page being viewed in a browser has geoURLs of some sort in its header, and if it does, to make Google Earth fly there (in the background, if possible). [Note to self: Learn Javascript]
2) Use Brad Choate’s Key Values plugin to allow Movable Type blog posts to contain geoURL data, which are then placed in the page’s html header, but which is additionally output as a KMZ feed alongside the RSS feed, so that Google Earth users can read network-linked blogs geographically, rather than sequentially (which is the RSS way).
The idea being that geographic proximity is far more important to us social animals than we might have let on this past decade, infatuated as we were with the newness of the web URL.
(Yes, I’m posting this in the hope that somebody will beat me to it.)
Geeks loving Google Earth is all good and well, but it’s when the cool people embrace Google Earth that you know the meme has legs.
Or in this case, wheels. Longskate afficionado Pappy Boyington has a blog that documents the best longskate runs in Paris. To document the ride, he uses screen captures of a Google Earth view onto which he has overlaid a layer from a Google Maps-like French mapping service. The result is clean and clear, and provides an interesting alternative to the European road overlays already in Google Earth and the hybrid view in Google Maps (which doesn’t work in Europe).
I’ve wondered before what it would look like to replace the satellite images used in Google Earth with the maps images from Google Maps — and then turning on terrain so that the effect is that of a 3D map. For places like Sydney or San Francisco, such maps would be of far greater value than the 2D Google Maps version for pedestrians, cyclists or the wheelchair-bound. Not to mention longskaters.
Turning such views into something that is dynamically generated looks like an insurmountable challenge for hackers, though. It might have to be something best left for Google.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
