The Toronto Globe and Mail reviews Google Earth.
The only negative the reviewer can think of is that “the software is addictive.” (And she thinks the user interface looks like “tired engineering software”, but that it doesn’t matter given the content she has to play with.)
Via Topology Errors, an article in GIS trade magazine Directions about what professional GIS programmers think of Google’s KML markup language:
Apparently, they love it.
d’Isle Log blog has a succinct comparison of Google Earth and NASA World Wind.
(Briefly: In the plus column for World Wind: Easy access to very recent photographic overlays displaying current events, like oilwell fires or floods. In Google Earth’s plus column: The easy sharing of user created content using KML markup.)
Tom’s Hardware Guide has Nvidia’s CEO pinning the company’s hopes for future growth on apps like Google Earth:
While workstations will need more graphics capability for medical imaging or 3D CAD to allow collaboration around the world, he said, consumer devices such as cellphones or embedded automotive devices could soon take advantage of software such as Google Earth: “Imagine the potential using 3D graphics for search. You could fly to the next Starbucks on your navigation screen,” Huang said.
Reminds me of my post where I wished the in-flight entertainment screen maps were Google Earth-enabled.
In tomorrow’s edition, Die Welt (one of Germany’s most respected papers) grasps for superlatives in their review of Google Earth. They practically outdo Goethe in the florid descriptions of what it all means. Daedalus gets brought into it, as is Icarus, the 1968 student uprisings, Cryptome, some latin, Kim Jong Il, and a folk song by Brahms.
Everybody here reads German, right?
In the International Herald Tribune today, John Markoff explains the Web 2.0 and APIs to the mainstream reader, but also delves into possible revenue models for Google Maps and Google Earth.
He also looks at the competitive landscape:
Microsoft also plans to make use of satellite data, but its interface will be based on a Web browser, not separately downloaded software like Google Earth.
In contrast, Yahoo executives said they were skeptical about the value of satellite imagery, and the company is focusing instead on digital maps. Yahoo is hoping that Web users will emerge to overlay its maps with restaurant reviews and other kinds of contributions.
If that is the case, I’m afraid Microsoft and Yahoo are going to find they didn’t aim high enough. But let’s wait and see.
Rob Pegoraro’s 2-week old review of Google Earth is in The Seattle Times today, and thus misses out on reporting on all the social bookmarking innovation that’s happened in the meantime. But there’s one thing I didn’t know:
You can add “placemarks” for any interesting spots you find, then share them with other Google Earth users via an online bulletin board (bbs.keyhole.com). This ought to be directly integrated with Google Earth, instead of requiring you to save a placemark as a separate file, then switch to your Web browser to attach that file to a posting in that bulletin board.
It should then show up under the “Keyhole BBS” category in Google Earth’s Layers menu, but the program neglects to explain (as a Google publicist did) that it takes about two weeks for that to happen.
Still, the perfect review would have gone beyond drooling at the eyecandy to mention that the one thing that really makes Google Earth unique from its competitors (like NASA’s World Wind is that anyone can publish anything to Google Earth — it need not go via semi-official channels like the (still very useful) Keyhole bulletin board. If Microsoft’s upcoming Virtual Earth wants to compete, it will need to have the same level of openness.