All posts by Stefan Geens

Process

Google Earth tools

Two Google Earth tools, courtesy of the mysterious Meils:

“1. Smooth Path takes the path you give him to chew on, performs a cubic interpolation between the successive points in it and spits out a fresh kml-file with the result.”

“2. Random Path extracts the coordinates from your placemark and generates a random path around it.”

The first one is great for avoiding those rather abrupt changes in course when flying above a typical turn in a path. This makes it much more like flying. The second one is akin to, erm, flying suicidally?

Process

Filling in the blanks

1 Comment

Blogger Taylor Monacelli had a list of 1,200 zip codes with neighborhood names he would have liked mapped on Google Earth, but no coordinates. What if he made a KML file without the <point> and <coordinates> tags?

Sure enough, Google Earth opened the file and filled in the blanks for him. It found coordinates for all his neighborhoods. His post goes into the details.

Reviews

John Markoff on Google Earth

In the International Herald Tribune today, John Markoff explains the Web 2.0 and APIs to the mainstream reader, but also delves into possible revenue models for Google Maps and Google Earth.

He also looks at the competitive landscape:

Microsoft also plans to make use of satellite data, but its interface will be based on a Web browser, not separately downloaded software like Google Earth.

In contrast, Yahoo executives said they were skeptical about the value of satellite imagery, and the company is focusing instead on digital maps. Yahoo is hoping that Web users will emerge to overlay its maps with restaurant reviews and other kinds of contributions.

If that is the case, I’m afraid Microsoft and Yahoo are going to find they didn’t aim high enough. But let’s wait and see.

Content

Ogle Earth. Now it’s official.

Just as Google Earth Beta was getting an update, so was the look of this blog.

Ogle Earth is finally looking a bit more professional, so I guess a more formal launch is in order.

The aim of Ogle Earth is to collect resources, links, and news related to Google Earth, and to spot new trends as they happen — in other words, to keep a finger on the pulse of the Google Earth community. In the coming weeks and months, expect to see interviews with people of interest, and maybe how-tos and tutorials (if and when Google releases the Mac version — VirtualPC is proving a bit on the slow side at home, where the free time is.) Ogle Earth will not itself be a repository of markers or layers, but will point to them.

The motivation is simple. I am convinced that Google Earth and its upcoming competitors are a disruptive technology; these Earth browsers will fundamentally change how we web users envisage information. Most everything on the internet can be related back to the real world, but often the location dimension has been left unused. As a result, far too many place relationships have been left unmined, until now.

Google has proven to be a master of managing related data — witness Google Search. It has done so by harvesting the link-votes of ordinary web-users. Google is taking this tack again with its Earth, this time by letting it be a canvas on which anyone can create and share. Google Earth is visually stunning, but it is this openness to community creativity that currently makes the application unique, and why is it proving to be a rave success. And all these users will probably one day see Google’s sponsored links in their locational searches inside Google Earth, just as we now do with Google Search.

I am planning to stay abreast of this revolution. I thought a blog would be a good place to store and share what I find.

Reviews

WaPo review

Rob Pegoraro’s 2-week old review of Google Earth is in The Seattle Times today, and thus misses out on reporting on all the social bookmarking innovation that’s happened in the meantime. But there’s one thing I didn’t know:

You can add “placemarks” for any interesting spots you find, then share them with other Google Earth users via an online bulletin board (bbs.keyhole.com). This ought to be directly integrated with Google Earth, instead of requiring you to save a placemark as a separate file, then switch to your Web browser to attach that file to a posting in that bulletin board.

It should then show up under the “Keyhole BBS” category in Google Earth’s Layers menu, but the program neglects to explain (as a Google publicist did) that it takes about two weeks for that to happen.

Still, the perfect review would have gone beyond drooling at the eyecandy to mention that the one thing that really makes Google Earth unique from its competitors (like NASA’s World Wind is that anyone can publish anything to Google Earth — it need not go via semi-official channels like the (still very useful) Keyhole bulletin board. If Microsoft’s upcoming Virtual Earth wants to compete, it will need to have the same level of openness.

Reviews

Niche product?

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Microsoft employee and MSDN blogger Jason Sack is very impressed with Google Earth, But thinks he can do better (good, I too love competition). He also wonders if the application will ever be more than a niche product.

Yes of course it will. It will completely revolutionize how we mentally place information. Via Jason Sack’s comments, Dean Heckler provides an eloquent response:

A quick look at its file format reveals its simple to create your own content – the same feeling I got when I looked at HTML for the first time in 1995. This leads me to profess that Google Earth is not a niche application, but the first truly engaging Earth Browser.