1.Lawrence, Kansas is the center of the Earth. Or at least Google Earth. The town’s own paper has an absolutely charming article about how Lawrence is the town directly below your feet when you first fire up Google Earth.

2. A Canadian geography teacher lets Google Earth loose among his students and describes what happens.

3. A blog post hosted by the Belgian paper De Standaard reports (in Dutch) that in Greece, the military is not at all happy with the high resolution imagery of Athens that is publicly available in Google Earth. Apparently, they are upset that satellite imagery of Turkey is of lower resolution than that of Greece. I’m sure this problem could easily be fixed:-)

4. Google Earth and Maps are about to get their very own book, Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth, written by Martin Brown. (Via Let’s push things forward)

5. A Google Earth Community post reports that there is a location error for two locations in Russia. (I too have found that searching for Islamabad, Pakistan and Stockholm, Sweden leads to locations that are in-country, but not accurate at all.) Another user mentions that there is a data error reporting form for this sort of thing, with instructions.

6. Australian GIS company ER Mapper publishes layers of Landsat imagery of Australia from various years as a free KML network link, part of a demo of its web serving abilities.

7. Google Earth Hacks posts a network link that displays 38,000 geographically marked-up Wikipedia entries, the best 80 at a time in your current field of view. Pretty awesome way to surf and learn.

8. Wow, is the Times of India a one-note whining machine or what? And the paper has a tenuous relationship with the facts, especially if these get in the way of jingoistic pursuits (noted: Google Earth was launched June 28, 2005, not “almost 18 months ago”).

This one is rather hard to verify, but it would appear that Bristol student and layabout Matthew Wilkes is the first person to have found himself in Google Earth, as reported in The Register.

Run, don’t walk, to this incredibly slick implementation of Google Earth as a game cum World Cup marketing exercise by Adidas. It’s seamless and impressive, with clever use of Flash to boot (and I hate Flash). (Via Sammi Needham)

The Opposite End of China comments on a thorough Wall Street Journal article about Google’s efforts to enter China, and the compromises it has had to make with the Chinese government regarding the censorship of information within its borders. Apparently, bits of Earth and Maps are censored in certain parts of China, as of a few weeks ago:

The balance has already proved tricky. Until recently, Google’s map and satellite-photo service offered Chinese Internet users something they rarely could see: a bird’s-eye view of the secret compound of Zhongnanhai, where the country’s top leaders live and work.

But in recent weeks, close-up views from Google’s satellite images of the leadership compound in Beijing have been blocked in at least parts of China. It’s not clear how widespread the blocking is, or whether the government is behind it. Google says it didn’t alter that part of its service for Chinese users. In any case, the feat betrays a high level of technical expertise.

Barring the possibility of this just being due to a bad connection, it is also not clear whether this censorship exist in just Maps, just Earth or both. I can imagine how it might be relatively easy to block specific high-resolution tiles for Maps, as these have specific fixed names, but it must be a lot more difficult to sniff out what Google Earth is sending and receiving. Another thing I wonder about — wouldn’t a dose of encryption make Google Earth exploration completely opaque to outside snoopers?

BTW, here is a site that links to Zhongnanhai. If anybody in China reads this, I’d love to see a screenshot of what Google Maps and Earth show at this location. (Location in Earth [KML], Maps)

If the Chinese government is blocking its own citizens from seeing where their leaders live, whereas the rest of the world can see just fine, we’re talking some major institutional paranoia.

The New York TImes has a very competent article out today about the security concerns and border dispute issues that have followed the release of Google Earth. To me, the two new/interesting elements were:

1) a highlighting of how Google Earth is used by advocacy groups to monitor tropical deforestation or publicize prison camps in North Korea.

2) Comments by Andrew McLaughlin, a senior policy counsel at Google:

He said Google recently began talks with India centering specifically on images of the Kashmir border, long disputed by India and Pakistan. McLaughlin said Google had also entered into discussions with other countries over the past few months, including Thailand and South Korea. […]

Meetings with Indian officials or those from other nations have yet to result in a request that Google remove or downgrade any information, McLaughlin said. Nor has the United States government ever asked Google to remove information, he said.

I hope the “yet” does not imply that information downgrades are possible. If they are, I hope we’re informed ahead of time, so that we can take screenshots of the most interesting bits and keep them as overlays, albeit privately.

Reporting better late than never: On December 13 Google Earth’s vector data was updated. Writes PenguinOpus on Google Earth Community, “Improved appearance of roads (especially in Europe) and multiple levels of density for business layers (eg: dining, lodging) are the biggest changes. Better road data should improve frame rate on low-end graphics cards when roads are turned on.”