VlogMap Blog proposes a new geotag to use with del.icio.us: geovlogged. Any post containing a video that is also tagged in del.icio.us with “geovlogged” now appears on VlogMap’s GeoVlogged VlogMap and in their Google Earth KML feed.

e-ality, a German blog, busts out with two cool innovations. First, a page that converts International Gliding Commission (IGC) files into KML, so that anyone doing air-sports can now impress their friends with their paragliding escapades in Google Earth (as XAlps paragliding contestants did in an earlier Ogle Earth post).

Second, e-ality’s WordPress-driven blogging engine now features some kind of geodata integration that automatically generates Google Maps and Google Earth links for blog posts. This post says that it’s all a work in progress (translation into French, okay, kidding, English) and we’re not yet given a peek under the hood, but I am all for blog publishing plug-ins that allow us to treat geodata properly. Geodata is the missing link (literally, ha) to the real world, and so often blog posts are about specific locations.

But that’s not all. The German-language version of the IGC converter page links to another site that has KMZ files with translucent extruded polygons denoting all the no-fly zones for air-sports in all of Europe. It looks very impressive in Google Earth.

(More links: A German paragliding thread about IGC and Google Earth; a page that shows IGC files in Google Maps.)

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Portland’s bike path plans, Brandon Martin-Anderson explains how his least-hilly bike trip finder works on Seattle’s BadHill:

The backend router works by finding a path which minimizes the total sum of energy expended riding from origin to destination. This is actually relatively simple, as there are well-established algorithms for finding the “least” path between two points in a network, and in my case the “least” that it finds is ‘energy expended on road link’.

Because you theoretically spend the same amount of energy climbing a given altitude no matter what the slope is, BadHill’s routing engine doesn’t really *care* what the slope is, as long as you never have to waste elevation gain. Say you have to travel five miles with 500 feet of elevation gain. BadHill would rather you shoot up those 500 feet in a block with crampons and caribiners if that meant it was totally flat the rest of the way, as alternative to a gentle slope upward which occasionally dips down a little bit.

This is obviously a problem in some circumstances, but it ends up being mathamatically simple and “workable” for the beta. I’ll fix it eventually.

Incidentally I went out riding last night to test out some of BadHill’s recommended routes and discovered that my algorithm needs some tweaking. There was a hill where there shouldn’t have been. It was bad.

If anyone else ever tries to patent this, you’ve got your prior art right here. Not sure whether Portland’s Metro is working on a similar solution and showing the results in Google Earth, or whether they are reying on Google for the backend. I’ll try to find out.

Blogs, who reads them? Seriously, all they do is get stuff wrong. Look at this Ogle Earth post on converting WMS data to KML using PHP, for example — Wrong wrong wrong. As Chris Tweedle points out (on a blog, granted), the PHP he produced doesn’t need to reside on the WMS server — it can sit on your own server, and then all you need to do is point a network link to it. The PHP code does the WMS getmap request for you and then returns the result as KML. (I’ll try this with the Atlas of Canada tonight.)

And then this clearly speculative Ogle Earth post about how Microsoft should respond to Google, written with the intent of garnering objections, has now been turned into “a big rumor,” sourced to a certain mysterious “GLE Earth” blog.

Bad blogs. Behave.

<meta name=”description” content=”A long-form piece that tries to zoom out a bit for a better big picture. You will either know everything in it already, you won’t care, or it will be fundamentally flawed in some way. Please choose one.”>

It’s always fun to show off Google Earth to a first-time user while surreptitiously observing their reaction; it really is an impressive application. Don’t forget that all this immersive goodness is just a lure, however; it’s meant to draw us in until we find ourselves using its most innovative feature: The network link.

Continue reading Towards metadata for KML →

I can’t test this, but J√∂rn-H. has made a sort of widget called GE-Remote that takes the input from a GPS unit and uses it to steer Google Earth in real time. As he succinctly puts it, “With a mobile internet connection (GPRS, UMTS or WirelessAccessPoint) you have a moving map now.”

Again, perfect for flying SAS to New York, except that now the process appears to have been idiot-proofed.

(Via this Google Earth Hacks thread.)

Steeev, who seems to be posting all over the place these days, came out with an updated version of his Greasemonkey Google Maps geotagging script that has much smoother integration with Google Earth. It sort of makes me want to use Flickr.