• Google Earth now has addresses and directions for Australia, though no roads (as of yet). Doing a search for the place where I used to live Sydney proved spot-on:

  

  (Thanks to Michael Smalley)

• Kurt introduces me to yet another 3D visualization system — IVS3D’s Fledermaus. It seems to be particularly suited to viewing and manipulating bathymetry data, and even comes in Linux and Mac versions.

  Kurt also shows off a new feature in the latest version, 6.4 — exporting to KML. His screenshots and explanation are worth a look. (No info on pricing for Fledermaus, so I’m pretty sure I can’t afford it.)

• eZ publish, which I had not heard of before, is a Norwegian open source content-management system. Bjørn Sandvik used it to create KML templates, and you can see the resulting KML-savvy web pages here (in Norwegian).
• Google Earth Blog highlights an innovative way to bring in-world video to Google Earth via clever use of the timeline.
• NASA World Wind 1.4 is due on Valentine’s day. Aw.

This article was online, disappeared, but has now shown up again: Switzerland’s NZZ Online profiles CyberCity, the Zurich-based company behind the (impending) 3D version of Hamburg in Google Earth. Choice excerpts:

[Google] has already snapped up a three:dimensional model of Hamburg from the Swiss creators and has now asked them to supply more cityscapes with levels of detail currently unavailable on Google Earth. […]

“We are confident that we can have a productive relationship with Google in the coming years,” said [CyberCity managing director Franz] Steidler. “This is quite a breakthrough for us.”

The company already has a stockpile of some 50 cities mapped out in 3D detail in its database, including Paris, Salzburg, Florence, Los Angeles, Chicago and parts of Zurich.

“We will get a list from Google of what they want from us,” added Steidler.

What’s interesting is that the original initiative for putting CyberCity’s 3D Hamburg into Google Earth came from Hamburg’s local government and businesses, not Google; though now it seems that CyberCity’s other offerings have caught Google’s eye.

Clearly, the competition that is driving both Microsoft and Google to ever-greater lengths to impress users is unequivocally a Good Thing ™ for us:-)

Today I’ve been eagerly waiting to get into Pipes, Yahoo!’s most excellent-sounding universal mashup engine — and so has everyone else, as it’s been down ever since I heard about it on TechCrunch. (Maybe it’s because Tim O’Reilly called it “a milestone in the history of the internet.”:-)

As I haven’t actually had a chance to play with Pipes, I’m not going to describe what it is, instead leaving that to these two great examples (one and two) by Kevin Cheng.

I don’t think Tim O’Reilly is dabbling in hyperbole. For neogeographers in particular this will be something of a big bang, I suspect.

How? For starters, Kevin Cheng’s examples output GeoRSS by default, and the entire “pipe” is geospatially enabled.

Second, KML support is coming! From Yahoo! ! Check this out:

While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google’s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps website.

Start combining this with the power of the network link and we’re suddenly at a whole new level of mashing — where decision engines, inputs and formatting are all turned into interchangeable web services. This is much more than what XSLT stylesheets can do to XML.

I can’t wait to see what GIS pros and amateurs come up with:-)

This DIY controller for Google Earth goes straight to the front of the line for sheer inventiveness and bloodyminded perseverance. It’s not exactly portable, but who needs portability when you’re having this much fun?

Click To Play

More photos at the other side of the above link.

• OrbVista takes NASA’s public domain imagery and presents it in a semantically richer environment, with a view of the area in Google Maps and with a link to Google Earth. “All” that is left to do now is to automatically generate a KML overlay for the imagery:-) Great stuff. (Via Dan Karran’s Del.icio.us links)
• I was AFB (absent from blog) as the Jim Gray disappearance story turned into a huge distributed effort to find him. While things are looking grim for Jim Gray, I hope the distributed search & rescue effort sets a precedent, and that this innovation gets to save many lives in the future.
• DestinSharks’s Virgil Zetterlind reviews the Google Earth Voyager, a PC application that caches the high resolution imagery of a specific region so that you can later use Google Earth to navigate through it without an internet connection, using a GPS device. Virgil’s verdict: It works as advertised. (Use caution when installing unverified software.)
• New Virtual Earth blog: Virtual Earth for Government.
• A NASA World Wind Java FAQ, courtesy of The Earth Is Square: Short version: The public beta is due in April.
• Google is taking part in the Cairo Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Exhibition currently underway, showing off Google Earth.
• Still waiting on Hamburg’s 3D buildings…
• Virtually every online news site has now reported that Google has agreed to “blur” sites in India, and they are all wrong. What do you think the chances of getting a correction are? I’m not holding my breath.
• In case you were wondering how difficult it is to overlay a map on top of a Virtual Earth, the answer is: Not difficult at all. Here is a five-minute video tutorial of Mapcruncher to prove it, using a map of destroyed villages in Darfur. The result is more accurate than putting an overlay in Google Earth, though it isn’t visible on my Mac. (Via Virtual Earth blog)
• Virtual Earth’s Steve Lombardi is soliciting feedback for the Virtual Earth API. I think it would be lovely if it could work on my FireFox for the Mac. (Via Via Virtual Earth)
• Another default layer for Google Earth: Sunrises, courtesy of the Discovery Channel. It’s very pretty, but technically this is nothing new. What I’d like to see is not a KML file containing placemarks that link to videos, but the pop-up windows themselves being able to play videos. Or how about the ability to overlay a video on Google Earth?

Remember ObsRSS, the brainchild of sensor-web weaver Jeremy Cothran that adds some metadata tags to the RSS XML schema? Now he’s come up with ObsKML, which does the same for KML.

For a detailed discussion and examples, this is the thread you need over on Google Earth Community.

Jeremy’s motivation?

It would be great if Google or some group or organization could throw some more attention on this issue in regards to KML. KML standardizes the ‘where’ and ‘when’ information within a popular and easy xml standard and it would be interesting to see the ‘what’ part of this data stream standardized also. Separating data content from data display into a more standardized xml schema would allow KML to enable better end user data reuse, aggregation and styling needs.

As far as I understand it, KML is a tradeoff between ease and power. For a fully descriptive mark-up language that properly separates style from content, try GML, though it is harder to use.

[See the update below]

A strange report by AFX this morning, referencing a Times of India article that I can’t quite find online:

Google Earth to blur key India sites amid security concerns – report

NEW DELHI (AFX) – Google’s satellite image service will blur strategic Indian locations such as government buildings and military sites after security concerns were voiced by the country’s president, the Times of India reported, quoting unnamed officials.

Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) Earth will not only blur pictures of sites that the Indian government considers sensitive, but also distort building plans of key facilities, the report said.

It said that Google representatives met Indian officials from the science and technology ministry recently to discuss the issue.

Google Earth will accept the government’s list of strategic sites that need to be masked, the report said.

Times of India is notoriously inaccurate, jingoistic and prone to optimistic reporting, so I’m taking this report with a grain of salt until I get confirmation. Most likely, Indian government officials, emboldened by the news of Google reverting its dataset to pre-war imagery of Basra, have now submitted a list of items they would like censored on Google Earth, and Google have promised to consider them. But then again, Google has just acquiesced to a censorship request in Iraq, so why not in India? If some security concerns are legitimate, why not all of them? Who are we to decide? Trust the government in situations like this. Any government will do.

In case you’re wondering if the censored Basra imagery is available on the web today — yes it is, and via the Google Maps API. Just ask for the right dataset in your JavaScript, and the imagery from September 2004 is still served up.

(Written in a lovely cafe on a snowy Sunday in Helsinki.)

[Update 2007-02-05: Here is Google’s on-the-record response:

“We were pleased to have the dialogue, which was substantive and constructive but no agreements have been made,” a spokeswoman for Google India said Monday.

Seems like Times of India jumped the gun. Again.]