A comprehensive phylogenetic visualization of the avian flu virus (phylogenetics = the mapping of genetic mutations over time and space) has just been published (press release) and its centerpiece is a KML file that shows the evolution of the virus as it travels out of East Asia and into Europe and Africa. Here is the KMZ file:

We’ve seen these shapes before in Google Earth. In fact, almost exactly a year ago Andrew Hill published a teaser of this data. At the time, this blog wished Google Earth had a timeline function — that wish has now been granted, and Andrew has been quick to take advantage of the technology: You can now see the virus mutate as a function of both space and time. It’s a mesmerizing but sobering sight.

Using the timeline is not the only cool thing about this visualization. I especially like how the KMZ file uses a combination of radio boxes and screen overlays to create what looks a lot like a list of interactive PowerPoint slides. It’s a technique well worth remembering:

The article itself you’ll have to buy, but the eyecandy is free. And really, who reads Systematic Biology for the articles? :-)

(Via H5N1)

A Chilean village in Patagonia on the border with Chile is shown as belonging to Argentina in Google Earth, reports Reuters:

The Chilean government wants Google to fix its Earth geographical search program that places a village named after Chilean independence hero Bernardo O’Higgins in Argentina.

A quick check shows this to indeed be the case:

Villa O’Higgins does indeed seem to be mislabeled, the border mismapped, and all this uncontested by Argentina — a rare factual error. (Google’s Megan Quinn says they’re looking for more accurate data for the region.)

Both the place and border data is provided by Europa Technologies. I wonder how this error managed to get into the dataset: Is the border we see an old border? Fiction? :-) It’d be great to find out.

Moral of the story (not that you haven’t heard it here before): People (and their governments) care deeply about the accuracy of Google’s geographic data. The upside: With masses of people fact-checking the minutest details of Google’s dataset every day, it must be getting quite accurate indeed by now.

Thankyouthankyouthankyou Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith for leading the way to that holy grail of Nokia N95 usership: No-fuss uploads of just-taken, automatically geotagged photos to my Flickr account, viewable live by anyone via Google Maps while I’m still in the field taking pictures.

The hero of Andrew’s story is a wonderful application named ShoZu, which I think is destined for fame and fortune as more of these kinds of phones go on sale.

Basically, ShoZu is a conduit between all the photos and videos on your phone and the myriad of web services you can post them to. It does this by remembering your userids and passwords for each service, and then publishing the content you select via that service’s API. It’s free.

You can post images, video and/or text directly to Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Vox, LiveJournal, Google’s Picasaweb, YouTube, Blip.tv, Windows Live Spaces, Flickr and many more lesser known services, some of which sound quite intriguing (like Qipit).

You can also send stuff to an email address, to an FTP server, or — and this is just amazing — the BBC or CNN, in case the submission is newsworthy. To publish content, you can either use your phone account’s data connection (which may be expensive), or you can wait until you get within range of wifi.

As Andrew notices, Shozu has an option that automatically adds coordinate data to the photos you take if a GPS fix is available. Currently on the N95, you need to “hotwire” the GPS tracking by running another program that turns it on, like the built-in maps program or Nokia’s free Sports Tracker. An upcoming version of ShoZu will be able to turn on the GPS tracking module all by itself, writes a ShoZu developer in a comment to Andrew’s post.

When you upload a georeferenced picture to Flickr with ShoZu, it is automatically geotagged, which of course means that it is viewable on Flickr’s own map, but also via your own personal GeoRSS feed. While Flickr’s map functionality is lovely, it lacks high resolution imagery in areas crucial to me (Sweden, Egypt, Belgium), so instead I subscribe to the feed using Google Maps’s support for GeoRSS. Here is my newly minted Google Maps geotagged Flickr feed. Notice how accurate the GPS fixes are — indeed, to within 10 meters in every case. (I’m not sure why I’m getting duplicate items at the moment, though.)

So what are the next steps for seeing this service become more seamless?

I’m hoping that Shozu will soon support Panoramio. This would also solve another problem: There is currently no easy free way to subscribe to my georeferenced Flickr photos in Google Earth, because Google Earth does not currently support GeoRSS feed subscriptions, like Google Maps does. (Trippermap does provide a KML feed for a user’s Flickr photos, at $10 per year. I’ll be giving that a try.) Of course, an easier solution would be for Google Earth to support GeoRSS — something which Rev Dan Catt asks for eloquently here:-)

I’d also like to be able to paste an inline Google Map of my Flickr GeoRSS feed onto my website. Perhaps Flickr could offer feed options, filtering for just the most recent 10 pictures or two weeks’ worth of photos or so — something which will have people coming back for more. (Or perhaps Feedburner could get GeoRSS support so I can roll my own feeds.)

It would also be nice if Picasaweb were to become geospatially enabled. You can use Google’s standalone photo management program, Picasa, to geotag photos with Google Earth, but this information is not used when you publish the result to Picasaweb. This is one opportunity for integration between two Google properties — A Google Earth network link from Picasaweb — which hasn’t yet been taken advantage of.

And how about automatically geotagged videos? I noticed this past weekend when uploading my videos of a little protest rally I was at here in Stockholm is that YouTube now asks you (optionally) for the date when the video was taken, and where exactly it was taken. Is Google building a database of georeferenced videos? A geospatially enabled YouTube, perhaps with a default layer in Google Earth if/when inline video arrives to that application, would truly be a stunner. Want to see all the videos taken at a specific football match? You’d just zoom in on the stadium, filter for the specific day, and see the game from as many different angles as there are video uploads.

I’m back in Stockholm for a week for work, and the first thing I did when I got off the plane was walk into a mobile phone store and get me a Nokia N95. I’ve had little time to play with it yet, but the GPS functionality sure works, and I am looking forward to finding out cool geospatial uses for it. I’m very relieved I write a geospatially themed blog, as it has provided the perfect foil for rationalizing the purchase of a $1,000 phone “mobile multimedia computer” (yes, that’s how much it costs in Sweden.)

Meanwhile a quick processing of Ogle Earth’s various inboxes and alerts:

• Tagzania now also lets you post routes (in addition to placemarks), and Luistxo shows you how.
• A localized version of Google Maps for Belgium is now live — forgot to mention that last week. This also means directions in Google Earth now work for Belgium.
• Virgil Zetterlind of EarthNC, producers of marine charts for Google Earth, writes in that there is now a free online version of the charts. Both the free and the Plus version (on CD or downloadable) have recently been made Mac and Linux compatible.
• The American Institute of Architects gets a default layer in Google Earth sporting really gorgeous textured models of American architectural icons. Frank has details, and a video demo. (Press release)
• Got a Mac? Then check out this Dashboard widget: TNTmap. “TNTmap is a set of interconnected widgets designed to locate, organize, and view WMS geodata”, including in Google Earth.
• San Francisco Emotion Map, in KML.
• The “aid worker” who figured out that you can no longer download Google Earth in Sudan has a blog. And a good one it is too.

Google Earth gets the Simpsons treatment:

Nothing spells mass cultural relevance quite like a cameo on the Simpsons. Historic, I’d say:-) (Via Rudd-O)

Suddenly, not one but two articles examining the implications of KML 2.1’s <Metadata> tag: Adding Metadata to Your KML Files on the Google Code site, by Google Geo Team member Mano Marks; and Transporting GML in KML by Ron Lake on his blog.

Both articles explain how the <Metadata> tag allows KML to ascribe properties to the content it is depicting. Ron Lake uses GML as an example, while Mano Marks uses ObsKML, developed by Jeremy Cothran (who is not a newcomer to this blog).

(In part via Sebastian Good’s blog, where he comments: “And there it is. KML is the new shapefile.”)

Takashi U posted his finding in Japanese to Flickr, but the screenshot needs no translation: Google Spreadsheets does geocoding.

Sort of, at least. It’s an undocumented feature, and it may be because it isn’t ready for prime time yet, but the implications sure are interesting, especially if you’re looking for ways in which a future Google Office might use Google’s strengths to leapfrog Microsoft.

Basically, just fill a cell with =GoogleLookup(“New York”, “latitude”) and up comes the answer. Instead of “New York”, you can reference another cell, of course, like so:

But here’s the problem: This isn’t yet formalized geocoding, and the sources are varied. For Cairo, for example, the latitude is correct and comes from three reputable sources (just hover over the cell to view them) but the longitude is for Cairo, Illinois. Specifying which Cairo (or Paris, or London) by appending a country name doesn’t work at the moment.

Still, this is a wonderful conceptual leap, and it has implications that are similar to Yahoo!’s Pipes, which, by the way, got a serious geocoding module two weeks ago as part of a major update. (Yes, it gets coordinates for both Cairo and Paris right — GoogleLookup does not).

Remember, too that you can reference individual cells in Google Spreadsheets, like so. (The easiest way to turn a spreadsheet into KML is still through EditGrid and its support for XSL, however.)