• Pakistan Injects Precision Into Air War on Taliban – NYTimes.com
  NYT: Pakistan Air Chief Marshal Qamar: "We were forced to use Google Earth" in air war on Taliban (!)

• U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Adds New Data to Google Earth Showing Twice As Many Destroyed Villages in Darfur
  Crisis in Darfur Google Earth layer gets updated, with twice the data re destroyed villages, before and after images
• BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | New 'crisis satellites' launched
  UK-DMC2 and Deimos-1 satellites launched, will quickly image natural disasters

• Outside World Turns Blind Eye to N. Korea's Hard-Labor Camps – washingtonpost.com
  WaPo: North Korea says political prison camps don't exist, but high-resolution satellite images show otherwise

• Gallery – What if the Eagle had landed on Earth? – Image 2 – New Scientist
  New Scientist: What if the Eagle had landed on Earth? KML file of Apollo excursions overlaid on city centers

• U.S. releases unclassified spy images of Arctic ice – Yahoo! News
  US releases classified satellite images of Arctic ice, so scientists can use them. Would be cool in Google Earth too.

• Digital Urban: Panorama Ball Vision: Spherical Display
  Ah! A spherical display for panoramas based on rotating LEDs, leaving the center empty
• Google LatLong: Where in the World is … (Answers)
  What are the intel orgs, NGOs and corps zooming in on these days? Just check Google Earth's updated imagery KML file
• Google Releases Details on July Imagery Update in KML
  Updated Google Earth imagery now tagged via a KML file. Fantastic. Add this to the default More layer, please Google?

It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally managed to process the digital trail of my trip to Sana’a and Socotra in February 2009. Download the KML file (300 KB) containing my photos on Flickr, my panoramas on 360Cities, my GPS tracks for most of the trip, the portion of those tracks on Socotra’s brand new paved roads (something you won’t find on any published map, nor on the satellite imagery currently in Google Earth) and finally, for reference’s sake, individual track points.

Here’s a teaser from Sana’a:

Sana'a: View from a rooftop at sunset in Yemen

Bread suq, Sana'a, Yemen in Yemen

And here’s a teaser from Socotra:

Dragon's Blood trees, Diksum Plateau, Socotra, Yemen in Yemen

Admittedly, the only content with “real” geographical value in that file is the fresh road network on Socotra, but now that OpenStreetMap has hit the big time with its imminent embrace by Yahoo! Maps, I think I will try to submit the road data to both OSM and Google Map Maker over the weekend, and compare the processes. Stay tuned.

Then, coming up next week, the reason I’m in Shanghai:-) I’m heading into to the countryside to see the eclipse in a pollution-free spot, but weather- and cellphone coverage permitting, I’ll tweet it live on @ogleearth, with pics.