Google Earth Blog links to fboweb.com, which does live flight tracking in Google Earth (for a fee, but with a free demo for LAX).

Spatially Adjusted and others link to screenshots of ESRI’s upcoming ArcGIS explorer, and boy does it look sweet.

Via The Map Room (via Geocarta), It’s the Indian government’s turn to protest using the Line of Control as the defacto border between Pakistan and India in Kashmir. Previously, this complaint has been made by the odd blogger. The Times of India article points out:

The political map of the subcontinent in Google Earth shows the region that India calls Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, or PoK, and Pakistan calls it ‘Azad (free) Kashmir’, as being a part of Pakistani territory.

But Google also shows the India-occupied portion of Kashmir as being part of India. The government of India might want to be careful what it wishes for, as any objective depiction that disaggregates Pakistan-controlled Kashmir would also need to disaggregate India-controlled Kashmir. I’m sure that’s not what they’re looking for. In fact, I’m sure this is just another bout of cheap patriotic positioning. Cheap, because bashing Google carries no repercussions.

I still think the solution is for Google to outsource these kinds of calls to National Geographic.

No, it’s not what I guessed it might be from the name, but it’s an interesting project nonetheless. From tomorrow’s press release (embargoes are so old media:-):

Google Space Launches at London’s Heathrow Airport to Fill Passengers’ Dead Time

… On Thursday 24 November, Google is launching Google Space at Heathrow’s Terminal One. Google Space is a laboratory comprising Google pods, which travellers can access for free once through security to log onto the Internet, check their mail and use Google tools to find out about their destination.

A big part of this set-up involves Google Earth. It should be quite a crowd attractor with people, I suspect. Here is Google Space’s home page.

A post on Second Life Future Salon expands on some of the implications brought on by the ease with which models can/will be imported into Google Earth and into Second Life, now that there are conversion tools for 3DsMax.

Elsewhere, they’re converging World of WarCraft with Second Life, sort of. Looks like all these virtual worlds just can’t wait to get mashed up (just look at yesterday’s post on Civ4, for example).

I wonder if we’ll end up having virtual overlays for Google Earth that serve similar entertainment functions as Second Life — allowing for fantasy apartment buildings in NYC, for example. But even a Google Earth layer suffers from scarcity… unless we each got our own, though that wouldn’t be as much fun.

Google Earth Blog has the rundown.

As for this site, it will have to play second fiddle to another project this weekend, Bloggforum. Back with more Google Earthiness on Monday or thereabouts.

It’s been nearly 5 months since Google Earth’s release (on the PC), and winter is upon us in the northern hemisphere. Providing information about ski resort conditions sounds like a natural candidate for Google Earth/Maps enhancement, and now the good folks behind www.vlogmap.org have come out with ridertech.com, which offers video reviews of conditions in the north-western US, live webcams where available, weather updates and a geographic database viewable with both Maps and Earth.

With the level of detail that Google Earth affords (and also the ability to depict slopes in 3D), I can imagine future versions of this database breaking down the data to the level of individual ski runs, mapping them, annotating them socially, and offering live conditions, perhaps with hi-res overlays provided by the resorts themselves. Google could become an integral planning tool to any ski outing, especially if resorts step up with a willingness to provide geographic data for the consumption of sites like ridertech.

Brian Timoney of the Timoney Group has just launched a most impressive site: Envisioning Jonah Gas, “a website that presents a multifaceted view of the Jonah gas field in Sublette County, Wyoming exclusively through Google Earth data layers.”

There are geological overlays, map overlays, overlays with pipes and fields, and most impressive of all, 3D-representations of gas production across the field. In all cases, a 3D GIS viewer like Google Earth is the clear choice for visualizing such information in the most effective manner possible. It also helps that the site is clear, clean and smartly laid out.

The big picture here is that companies with natural assets such as oil fields or forests might want to start providing their shareholders with geographical representations of what they’ve invested in. Instead of just putting tables of figures and the odd chart in quarterly reports, why not post a KML file online illustrating these results geographically (just like www.jonahgas.com does)? It’s still cheaper than glossy paper, and far more impressive:-)

Press release below the fold…

Continue reading Jonah gas impresses on Google Earth →