Here are two very interesting datapoints that show beyond any doubt that the battle against censorship is going our way:

1. Hearts and minds dept:

In a most impressive turnaround, the once aggressively pro-censorship Times of India now argues that technologies like Google Earth and the good they do should not be banned because a minority uses them to evil ends. Never mind that the title and the argument appear cribbed from this blog, where I’ve made the argument ad nauseam these past few years, often at the expense of the very same Times of India — I’ll be gracious in my vindication:-). I’m just glad the reductio ad absurdum argument is now firmly ensconced in the minds of the Times of India editors, where I hope it has staying power:

If we hope to deprive future fundamentalists of crucial technologies we should keep in mind that they also use satellite telephones, mobiles and walkie-talkies – along with radios, GPS navigation devices, wi-fi laptops, Blackberrys and carrier vehicles such as cars and light aircraft or, as in the Mumbai attack, boats. So do we prohibit these too?

It’s possible that a recent interview with Google’s John Hanke in the Sydney Morning Herald — in which he voiced the very same argument — was the immediate catalyst for the editors’ change of heart, as the item was picked up by quite a lot of techy blogs and news services:

While this debate had “mostly died off” in the West, it was still a live issue in countries where the “government is used to controlling everything”, Hanke said. Often this concern was a pretext for a government trying to reassert control over its “closed information societies”, he said.

Good to see that the media is switching sides in this debate in India.

2. Pragmatic dept:

As long-time readers of this blog know, Google Earth imagery is either satellite imagery or aerial imagery. Country sovereignty does not extend into space, so satellite imagery is not censored before being released to the public (and Google Earth) (with some notable exceptions). Country sovereignty does extend into airspace, so state agencies do get to censor aerial imagery before we the public get to see it. Aerial imagery is more detailed, however, which has made for a nice conundrum for Google as it decides which imagery to use for its virtual globe.

That conundrum has now in many cases been made moot, purely from a pragmatic perspective. This is because Google Earth 5 comes with the incredibly nifty new historical imagery timeslider, which lets switch between image datasets taken at specific dates. For some locations there are multiple images available taken over the past few years alone, from different sources, and often these will include both aerial and satellite imagery, interspersed in time.

The upshot is that with Google Earth 5, neither you nor Google have to choose between higher-resolution censored imagery or slightly lower-resolution satellite imagery, if both is available. Just slide the timeslider to find the image that suits you best.

A spot in southern Spain perfectly illustrates this. Maarten Lambrechts found a censored spot in aerial imagery but then was able to circumvent the navigation by playing with the slider. He’s made a tour for Google Earth 5 that zooms in on the spot and then moves the slider for you.

Another power user who’s made deft use of this massive increase in available imagery is IMINT & Analysis’s Sean O’Connor. His own example of how it allows the circumventing of censorship is a post about a French military installation near Dijon. But Sean also manages to use the historical imagery datasets to point out specific events.

And historical imagery is also a great boon in other ways. For example, check out construction progress at the nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz, Iran. There’s imagery from February and October 2003, and then from 2007, with progress clearly noted. Before, comparing imagery required overlays of the kind in this post. No more.

Last Thursday, on the way down from an arduous walk into Socotra’s Haggier mountains, I chanced upon a circle of Socotran men in traditional garb at a wadi, picnicking with freshly roasted goat and tea. In English, they invited me to join them — they included Socotra’s six English teachers, one for each school on the island, celebrating the end of a two-week teaching workshop, in anticipation of teaching all Socotri children English from 4th grade starting next year (versus from 7th grade now).

Over handfuls of goat liver and rice, we discussed many things, but eventually the conversation turned to why I had come to Socotra. I mentioned Google Earth, expecting to explain it — but they all nodded immediately. How did they know Google Earth, I wondered? It’s on the computer at the main school in Hadiboh, Socotra’s capital. The other schools in Socotra remote villages don’t have internet access, but Google Earth is part of the curriculum in Hadiboh.

As for Hadiboh’s only internet café, where tourists and locals vie for the three PCs sharing a single 512Kb DSL line — Google Earth was installed on all of them.

I went to Socotra to get away from technology:-) but came back more aware than ever that the internet, and the applications it makes possible such as Google Earth, truly are the globe’s great levellers. The world is flat, and getting flatter.

Before starting on some meatier posts, here are some links from the past week or so:

• Topo KML Python script: Mitch Harris writes:
  

  After using the 3dsolar topo overlay maker for a while and becoming frustrated with its shortcomings I decided to do something about it. I made a handy python script which will make a topo overlay for the specified area and save it as a KMZ. It’s still early in development but works quite well. The advantage here is that you can pan and zoom in GE without it reloading all the time and also have the topo overlays available offline. Feedback is appreciated.

• Serving browser-dependent KML: Stephanie Lange discovers that KML in Google Earth 5 is rendered differently in some case than in version 4 (not to mention compared to Virtual Earth, Google Maps and Earth Browser). Reminded of how different web browsers render HTML differently, she’s set about developing a way to deliver different KML to different Earth browsers, documenting her process. An interesting read.
• OS X 10.6 to be location aware? Says AppleInsider:
  

  People familiar with the latest pre-release distributions of the next-gen OS say the software now includes the CoreLocation framework previously available via the iPhone SDK, which will allow Mac applications to identify the current latitude and longitude of the Macs on which they’re running.

  (Thanks Michael Smalley)

• Historical Street View? Michael Smalley has an idea: Preserving Google Street View layers in a historical database, so that panoramas taken from before the recent forest fires in Australia can serve as a record in perpetuity of what the destroyed communities there once looked like. Now that Google Earth has such historical databases for its satellite and aerial imagery, giving street view the same treatment is certainly an idea worth pursuing.
• SketchUp & autism: Google SketchUp proves to be a popular application with kids with autism, reports Newsweek.
• Google eArt, cont: Fantastic:
  

  2000 square meters of rooftops have been covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera [Kenya, one of the largest slums in Africa].

  Not to worry, the covering is in sturdy plastic, so serves as new roofs as well. The art is intended to be visible to the satellites that eventually populate Google Earth. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

• Holocaust, mapped: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has two new KML layers detailing the geography of the holocaust — a timeline layer showing concentration camps across Europe, and a holocaust encyclopedia that highlights places prominent in the internment of Jews, homosexuals, Roma and other minorities. (Via Le Technoblog du LAC)
• Mars flight simulator: Fly an F16 on Google Mars, just in case you still haven’t tried this…
• Virtual Earth 3D on the Mac (sort of): It’s baffled me why Microsoft continues to have Virtual Earth 3D be a Windows-only experience when this is clearly an impediment to having developers create universal browser-based apps, regardless of operating system. Now a third-party developer, The imaginatively named GIS Solution has made Dolomiti 3D, a browser-based virtual globe Java applet focused on showing walking trails in a section of the Alps but which can show any GPX track and in fact the entire world — apparently using Microsoft Virtual Earth’s 3D dataset and DEM. And it works seamlessly on the Mac, using many of the same keyboard controls as Google Earth. (Thanks Jeffrey)

PS I lost my Nokia N95 somewhere in Yemen, and as that is the only phone I own that can phone in coordinates for the GMap-Track map on the top-right of this website, I’m removing the map for the time being, as an out-of-date map is worse than no map at all…

Much as I wish I could spend the next 12 days documenting all the creative ways that Google Earth 5 will be put to use by developers and innovative users, I’ll be on the Yemeni island of Socotra instead. It’s a last-minute thing — when I checked on Monday there was still a spot left on the weekly plane ride there from Sana’a, so I grabbed it. I’ve been staring at it far too long on Google Earth — it’s time to go take a closer look while I’m still in the region.

Mobile phones don’t work on Socotra, and there is a telephone landline from Yemen that doubles as an internet connection, so don’t expect anything to show up here until February 16. And certainly no Google Latitude updates:-)

In the meantime, the sites that are most often first with the kind of news you might find on Ogle Earth are:

Digital Urban

Google Earth Blog

Google Maps Mania

Le Technoblog du LAC

Mapperz

I’ll be back soon, with lots of georeferenced stuff to share…

EarthNC‘s Virgil Zetterlind has an early hack out taking advantage of the new iframe support for placemark popups in Google Earth 5: You can now search georeferenced YouTube videos, get the result as a KML file, and then look for new keywords from within a popup in GE. Here’s the explanatory post on Maplify.com.

NOAA’s press release detailing their involvement of the Ocean in Google Earth.

Scripps Contributes to Google Earth’s Expansion into the Ocean (press release) and One of the Brains Behind the New Google Earth (article) — Both pieces are about Scripps Institution of Oceanography geophysicist David Sandwell’s recently produced global map of the ocean floor, now used by Google Earth 5.

EarthNC, which has been developing marine content for Google Earth, outlines how Google Earth 5’s oceanic improvements enhance their products. Among other things, they’ve produced some 3D charts mapped directly to the ocean floor.

One-time Keyhole Earth developer/co-founder Avi Bar-Zeev (now working on unspecified 3D projects at Microsoft) thinks Google Earth 5 is just great, though thinks less of the extended KML namespace, because he says it makes it harder to get KML embraced at Microsoft and elsewhere.

Matt Giger, lone-wolf virtuoso developer of the recently-made embeddable EarthBrowser thinks the KML extensions for creating tours fulfil a need, but wishes the time tags had been implemented differently.

Is Google Earth 5 default imagery dataset older than what it was before? New Jersey Geographer argues yes, at least in New Jersey.

Google Earth Design’s Richard Treves explains why the new touring functionality in Google Earth 5 is his favourite new feature, looking at it from the perspective of an educator.

Google’s Michael Ashbridge tells the OGC’s Mass-Market-GEO list, among other things:

To enable the sharing of these new features [in Google Earth 5], we have used the extension mechanisms available in OGC KML 2.2. You’ll find exhaustive detail on our main KML pages here: http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/

Additionally, there are specific articles on the main additions to KML here:

http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/touring.html

http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/altitudemode.html

http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/time.html

This morning we also updated libkml to v0.9, which fully implements all of our additions to the language: http://libkml.googlecode.com/

Finally, an initial XSD detailing the extensions is available here:

http://code.google.com/apis/kml/schema/kml22gx.xsd

On a matter unrelated to Google Earth: University of Southern California’s GIS research lab would like you to know that as a result of their ongoing research, there is now a free, secure and accurate geocoder available here — free at least to academic, non-profit, and governmental researchers and institutions.

And reporting a bit late — from a reader:

Alexei Karpenko and a Googler, Alex Kennberg, flew a high altitude helium balloon. There are some amazing pictures and KMZ files.

Also late to report, but wonderful — HeyWhatsThat.com‘s Michael Koslowsky writes (abridged):

I’ve just updated the Cosmic Visibility and Planisphere sites with this year’s solar and lunar eclipses The Cosmic Visibility site uses Google Maps with its sky maps to bring the night sky to your web browser. For the lunar eclipses and other options, use the Advanced Planisphere.

The size and amount of interesting new information about Google Earth available from around the web got to be a bit too much to append to the end of the original post, so here are the updates, collected into a new post. In this case, the most recent links are at the end.

Update – 21:50 UTC:

Google’s press release for Google Earth 5.0. One new thing not mentioned elsewhere:

Google Earth 5.0 is now available in 41 languages (previously 26): English (US), English (GB), French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Dutch, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Polish, Turkish, Thai, Arabic, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Indonesian, Czech, Greek, Norwegian, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Filipino, Slovenian, Serbian, Catalan, Latvian, Ukrainian, and Hindi.

The New York Times: Google Earth Fills Its Watery Gaps, which comes with some great color quotes from the main players.

The Guardian: Arctic in danger: Pen Hadow heads for North Pole to establish the facts:

Ocean in Google Earth will help make the fate of the Arctic Ocean and numerous other deep blue corners of our sapphire planet obvious to millions around the globe. The Catlin Arctic Survey, an expedition setting off later this month that I am leading to the North Pole, aims to provide crucial data on the state of the ice. We will make all of this information available via Google Earth. Our progress can be tracked on the web in great detail using the software.

Census of Marine Life (CAML) press release: Census of Marine Life and ocean in Google Earth bring ocean information to life

EveryTrail press release: EveryTrail Launches Tours in Google Earth. Yes, using the new touring feature.

National Science Foundation press release: The National Science Foundation Contributes to Newest Version of Google Earth

Ocean Conservancy press release: Ocean Conservancy Welcomes Ocean to Google Earth – New Tools Allow Users to Explore the Seas As Never Before

European Voice: EU joins Google’s effort to map oceans:

Some of the information provided by the Commission comes from a €4.25 million project run by the EU to map the seabed in European waters, known as the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODNET). The [European] Commission also intends to create an internet-based European Atlas of the Sea, which will be available later this year.

The Google Lat Long blog guest post by Sylvia A. Earle, Explorer-in-residence at National Geographic.

Google Earth Blog’s Frank Taylor has a flurry of posts looking at all the new features.

This is cool: Brian Flood looks at the new gx namespace that defines the markup language for the tour functionality:

The “gx” namespace contains several new tags that focus on the undersea functionality (gx:altitudeMode), the historical imagery (gx:timeStamp) and the new Touring engine in GE5 (gx:Tour, gx:flyTo, gx:AnimatedUpdate etc). Going forward, this is undoubtedly how they will sidestep OGC when they need to add new visualization functionality to GE in, shall we say, a timely manner.

His post continues with some ready examples of these tags in use.

Barry Hunter discovers some more interesting tidbits: Among others:

• HTML popup balloons are now rendered by a webkit browser, with Javascript and iFrames support
• Overview Map moved to behind the Google Logo
• Support for non-rectangular groundoverlays.

There is more where that came from.

Virgil Zetterlind also writes a post focusing more on the developer side of today’s announcement. He notes, among other things:

• Support for most CSS
• No support for cookies
• Links to local content disabled by default
• Polygons and Lines are now ‘hot’ clickable

He too elaborates on all this.

Update – 22:15 UTC:

• The elevation exaggeration option in preferences (changeable from 0.5-3) also works undersea. Undersea crevasses get deeper.
• The panorama “bug”, where the widest field of view allowed for a panorama is only around 60 degrees, is still there.
• Brian Flood links to it in passing but it is worth pointing this out: The KML reference page has been updated to include the new KML extension namespace and the gx prefix.

Update – 22:46 UTC:

SearchEngineLand liveblogged Google’s press event in San Francisco earlier today.

Update – 23:22 UTC:

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Both Google Earth Pro and Google Earth Enterprise also get a revamp to match Google Earth Free 5.0.

The Official Google Blog carries John Hanke’s blog post announcing Google Earth 5.

First product announcement that incorporates Google Earth 5’s new touring feature: Visual Nature Studio 3 lets you export the application’s camera motion paths as tours.

Google Lat Long Blog gives us the backstory behind the new historical imagery tool.

Kurt’s Weblog posts the NASA press release announcing Google Mars.

Have you downloaded and installed Google Earth 5? Good.

Before we start — Google Earth 5 comes with Google Mars! Click on the planet in the top toolbar and choose Mars. And once there, you get a whole new set of content to choose from, including some great new recent satellite imagery from HIRISE.

Here’s the content that’s available:

We’ll get to the oceans soon enough, but first, what is going to make by far the biggest difference to neogeosleuths is the fact that every single historical imagery update since the start of Keyhole Earth/Google Earth is now available, and also satellite and aerial imagery going all the way back to 1940, before the start of the space age. Here’s San Francisco in B&W from 1946:

Here it is in action, over the Fayyum, Egypt:

Google Earth 5: Historical datasets from Stefan Geens on Vimeo.

The other big new feature is recordable tours. Click on the video camera button in the top tool bar, and a recording button appears on the screen, together with a microphone. Click on the recording button to start recording your navigation in Google Earth, and if you click on the microphone you can add realtime audio commentary.

If you like the resulting tour, you can then save it into your Places control panel. What you’re saving is markup language, and it looks like this:

It’s important to know what this tour feature doesn and doesn’t record: It doesn’t record what overlays you have showing in Google Earth (or Mars or Sky) which popups you click nor if you are changing the historical background dataset. You can’t therefore use it all by itself to show specific content in Google Earth — you’ll need to tell the user what to turn on first. (I suppose you could use the audio track to tell him/her that.) The most likely use for this touring feature will be to include it in a larger KML file that you provide for people to download, with content that is visible by default.

Now for the main (press) event for Google Earth 5: Oceans. From afar Google Earth looks just like the old globe, with a 2D relief view of the oceans. As you zoom in in closer, the oceans become covered with a smooth undulating “sea” layer that provides a more realistic view of the Earth. Then, when you duck under the surface of the sea, you get to see the real 3D bathymetric view of the surface of the Earth under the sea. In both cases — looking from below the ocean to land, and looking through the ocean layer to the ocean floor — you see a real 3D height mesh that extends both above and below sea level. The best way to see it in action is to toggle on/off the Terrain layer — though I do wish there were a way of turning off the undulating sea layer while keeping the 3D height mesh for both sea and land. [Update: There is! See comments.]

But Google Earth 5 doesn’t just have this great new technology. There is a huge amount of additional content made available by Google in a new Oceans default layer. There is too much there for anything more than a cursory look just now, so here’s the whole list, just for the record:

Another big new feature is that — as promised — Google Earth 5 contains the discontinued Google Earth Plus‘s features, free, such as the importing of GPS tracks and real-time tracking. The ruler feature now also gives you the heading of a line you draw (and, yes, it will undulate over the terrain, including over underwater features.)

Some of the other new (or recent) changes:

• Tracks4Africa has been re-promoted to the Gallery — or rather, an expanded collection of placemarks by Tracks4Africa are now in the Gallery, while the road tracks are still in the “More” default folder. This is the only new addition to the Gallery and Global Awareness default folders, but that’s understandable, as the focus with this release is resolutely on the oceans.
• The Mac version looks at lot more Mac-like. Buttons get a refresh, and the overall feel is sunnier.
• the “More” default folder now also contains 2009 DigitalGlobe coverage.
• 3D buildings now has two subdivisions — Photorealistic and Gray — letting you choose precisely how bandwidth-hungry your Google Earth will be. [Update: Apparently this is an older feature]
• Switching to Mars, turning on an satellite image overlay and then switching back to Earth will continue show the downloaded Mars overlay,but on top of Earth — just like with Google Sky in Google Earth 4.3. Since the Places layer is shared by all datasets (Earth/Sky/Mars), you can however easily turn it off there.
• On the Mac version, You have to agree to the installation of an updater that runs in the background. (There was some criticism about this not being made explicit when downloading the Google Earth plugin for Mac browsers.)

  

• The Preferences pane has some new features:

  

  

  

• 3DConnexion’s SpaceNavigator works out of the box for above-ground work, but still thinks that there is nothing below the ocean surface. To navigate properly below the surface, you’ll need to avail yourself of the keyboard- or screen controls.
• And, yes, the islands that went missing a few weeks ago are still missing:-)

  

Now that all that is out of the way, pardon me while I go and play. I don’t really know where to start, but that’s a problem I love to have.

Go get it. Play. Come back in a little bit for a report and links to other sites reporting on Google Earth 5.

[Update: Stop the Presses! Google Earth 5 comes with Google Mars, in addition to a wonderful 3D ocean. Click on the Planet icon along the top bar and choose Mars. (Yes, World Winders will note that this feature has existed in World Wind for a while.)