BBC News’ Click Online’s series covers Google Earth in their article entitled Portal race goes local and global. It has some nice big-picture observations, but then the article’s credibility gets hammered by a whopper:

Google Earth has certainly hogged the limelight, but as we are discovering in this series, good ideas are rarely original. One day before Google Earth emerged, MSN launched Virtual Earth. It is not 3D, but the idea is pretty much the same.

Google Earth was launched June 28. MSN Virtual Earth was launched July 24/25. JFGI. When you get your basic chronology wrong, that somehow doesn’t inspire confidence in the authoritative tone of the rest of the article.

The New York Post, meanwhile, has found a Queens assemblyman (reg. req.), Michael Gianaris, who appears to have been shown Google Earth and who didn’t like what he saw. So he’s fired off a letter, cc-ing it to Homeland Security.

He grants that Google Earth “may be entertaining”, but notes:

Whenever terrorists are captured, their computers always contain photos and layouts of sensitive locations. And I don’t know what rationale could exist for providing them in any easy online format, free of charge.

Ah yes, those broke terrorists with their computers. I don’t know what rationale could exist for providing them with computers either, or the internet, for that matter. Let’s register fax machines too, Soviet style. Let’s close this Open Society, shall we, just to thwart the terrorists.

The Post ends with:

It’s not the first time that satellite photos have sparked concerns about security. The Pentagon says some areas are considered off limits to prying satellite cameras. And it has an agreement with two private firms, Digital Globe and Space Imaging, that limits the pictures they make public.

Just wait until they find out that unpatriotic foreign firms have no such agreements. I give them a week.

GIS professionals continue to debate on whether Google Earth justifies the hype it’s getting, and whether it is a Good Thing for the GIS industry, on Ed Parson’s blog, continued with a riposte by Ed here.

Ed points to the ease of creating one’s own map, which he equates with democratization:

This is the one place where I think Google does justify the hype, in a few months Google Maps has done more to allow the individual to develop mapping based websites than the traditional GIS industry has done in 10 years. The democratisation of Geographic Information in this way is the result of two things, firstly a simple, slick API for developers and secondly and most importantly of all, the making available of a consistent source of commercial geographic information at no cost to the developer or user.

I agree, but would stress (or rather, repeat myself) that in addition to it being easy to make things with (which is a function of its clear API and embrace of open standards) it is also free to consume, which allows a critical mass of people to benefit from these hacks, which in turn gives an incentive to programmers to make social software, which in turn thrives on the network effect.

So the secret of Google Maps’ and Earth’s success is twofold: It’s easy make things for and it’s free to consume, which encourages social software. And that’s not hype when it comes to Google Earth — It was also true for the lowly web browser.

Dutch blogs are reporting today that the country’s three largest parties have all formally asked parliament the government for an investigation into whether Google Earth presents a national security risk. If you read Dutch,

Kamer wil onderzoek naar veiligheidsrisico Google Earth

Ophef over Google Earth

Onderzoek naar Google Earth niet nodig

Politieke ophef over risico’s Google Earth

Google Earth als inzet komkommernieuws

The last post in this list is wonderfully laconic, and basically regards the existence of this story as evidence of the summer doldrums. The Dutch cabinet, meanwhile, has said that such an investigation is unnecessary, as the information already is available elsewhere. In fact, there is an established Dutch website that specializes in high-resolution images of the Netherlands, http://www.vanuitdelucht.nl/.

One motivation for such calls is undoubtedly a notion that Google is being hypocritical when it willingly censors Area 51 and White House environs but is unwilling to grant other governments the same courtesy. This view misunderstands how the data is gathered, as James Fee pointed out in an earlier comment. Google Earth buys the data mostly off US remote sensing companies such as DigitalGlobe. It is these companies that are tightly regulated — read DigitalGlobe’s product release policy. For it to operate, it needs to abide by US government restrictions — namely, thou shalt white-out the White House. Foreign remote sensing operations obviously need not. US companies can buy foreign uncensored data if they wish. No doubt Google could, but if it did, this would result in even less censorship, not more. And why should it, anyway? Google Earth is a free product. People who must see the roof of the White House can call a French company. Area 51 overlays are over here.

There is a domestic American variant to this meme:

Are mapping software’s [sic] putting armed forces at risk?

OK, I’m pissed off and confused

google Earth Makes Troups [sic] Furious

The defense here is the same: Governments, terrorists and anyone else with some cash can already get at this information. We might as well level the playing field, then, by making it available to all. Wouldn’t it be a trip if somebody on Google Earth Hacks found Osama Bin Laden?

Sorry, I couldn’t help it, but some stories just demand the tabloid headline treatment.

More calmly now: Head of Australia’s nuclear energy agency Dr. Smith would like Google to censor the imagery in Google Earth of that country’s only nuclear reactor, a small research and medical reactor at Lucas Heights. Here is the full story.

What, this reactor here?

You see, according to Dr. Smith, “The question comes down to, if you put it on the internet, does it go to Pakistan or Afghanistan and make it easy for them?”

Ah, of course, them. How unfortunate, then, that the last person to try to blow up the reactor, in 2003, was French. Or the fact that anyone can fly over the reactor, walk up to the gate, or buy aerial shots from dozens of vendors. Or that you don’t need a detailed map of the reactor if you just want to fly a jet into it.

<rant>In this day and age, all nuclear reactors are unsafe from determined terrorists. Reactors are bombs waiting for fuses. It’s why I no longer support nuclear energy. Had any one of those jets on 9/11 flown into Three Mile Island instead of their intended target, much of the Eastern Seaboard would be unlivable today.</rant>

(Update 2005-08-08 10:16 UTC: Cooler heads prevail in Australia’s federal government.)

<speculation kind=”rank” insider-knowledge=”0″ motive=”thought-experiment”>

So you’re Microsoft. You’ve been painted into the corner competitively by Google when it comes to mapping. It’s apparent to everyone that the product you thought would get you out of that corner, Virtual Earth, only competes with Google Maps, and is not in the same league as Google Earth. Google Earth is the next-generation browser, it has blindsided you, and you have nothing in the pipeline that delivers the same oomph or the extensibility of Google Earth. You need to recover from this situation quickly.

Pop quiz. Do you:

A) Poach the Google employees that made Google Earth?

B) Redouble your efforts in-house and develop a world-beating scalable mapping technology from scratch without infringing anyone’s patents?

C) Buy ESRI?

Answer below the fold…

Continue reading Memo to Bill Gates →

“Digital Earth” excerpts from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, circa 1992, including:

There is something new: a globe about the size of grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes… It’s a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that the CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns — all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

If he were in some normal, stable part of the world, like lower Manhattan, this would actually work in 3-D. Instead, he’s got to put up with two-dimensional satellite imagery.

Companies that make science fiction real are my favorite kinds of companies.

There’s more visionary writing about a digital Earth here, including Al Gore’s input. (Via Rags1611’s del.icio.us links)

James Fee wonders about reactions to a blog post by David Maguire on Google Earth, entitled “Geographic Exploration – The New Fad?“, and I am happy to oblige.

Who is David Maguire? As a GIS neophyte (I have friends who do GIS!) I had no clue, but I do now. He is “director of products” (is that like product manager, only different?) for ESRI, the company considered to be the world leader in GIS software and technology, and which has been sounding a tad defensive now that mass mapping as envisaged by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! is enjoying the limelight.

Maguire implies that Google Earth and its ilk are a fad, a bubble, and rhetorically wonders why people have written about it. He can think of six reasons: It’s Google, it’s free, it’s easy, it’s detailed, it’s fast and it’s different, (but read the post yourself).

That’s sort of stunning, because to me, the most important reason why Google Earth and Maps are a runaway success is not on his list: It’s social software. Google Earth is an extremely compelling canvas that people are using to link their experiences in the real world to the web.

Just one example: This afternoon, as soon as I heard about the copycat bombings in London, I fired up Google Earth, turned on my Blogwise network link and zoomed in on London. Five seconds later, a slew of local blogs popped up on the screen, including one I remembered having had exhaustive coverage of the bombings two weeks ago. Sure enough, within minutes I had read through a minute-by-minute account of this latest ordeal.

Meanwhile, with Google Maps, it’s all about open APIs allowing us to be creative in a myriad ways, doing things with a collective intelligence that no company, not even Google, could ever foresee.

But at least Google knows this.