• Military site Strategy Page looks at the effect Google Earth had in 2006… among US troops:
  

  Google Earth’s major problem was not it’s ease-of-use, but the manner in which it showcased the shortcomings of the American NGA (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency). The NGA is responsible for taking the satellite photos, spiffing them up as needed, and getting them to the troops. Trouble is, the stuff still isn’t getting to the troops that need it, when they need it. This was made very obvious when Google Earth showed up, and demonstrated how you can get satellite images to anyone, when they need it, with minimal hassle.

  That was the case too for when disaster strikes — such as with Katrina and the quake in Pakistan during 2005.

• An image of a brave new world that makes me very happy. It’s easy to be optimistic about the future when stuff like this is happening.
• You may have heard of FON, a grassroots wifi network of Spanish origin that is Big in Japan. There is now a Google Maps mashup that shows you where the FON wifi hotspots are, and it comes with a KML link. (Via Going My Way, whose author is definitely an early adopter)
• There’s a new Japanese Google Earth fan site on my radar screen: Noblesse Oblige. It comes with its own blog and wiki. I don’t understand much of it, but it looks promising:-)
• Tip of the week from Valery:-) In Gmail, if you compose a new email message, you can add event info, and there, too, you can add KML files in the “Where” field:

There is a new geotagging site on the block. Right from the get-go, Geonomy sports over 400,000 georeferenced locations — wikipedia articles, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency data, user-added content, geographic features — all of it searchable, viewable in Google Maps, and browsable by category and tag. Add to this USGS topo maps and US weather as overlays in Google maps. The pièce de resistance, however: Each category and tag has its own KML link for instant viewing in Google Earth. I just wish they’d be dynamic network links.

The site is the work of Ben Lewis and Scott Melby. Here’s how they explain what they’re doing:

Geonomy does not aim to be a warehouse of map information but rather an index to place descriptions which already exist on the web. Geonomy does aim to help expand the list of existing descriptions, improve the geographic locations of existing features, and to help improvements make it back into Wikipedia and other repositories.

That makes Geonomy more like Wikimapia and Geonames.org than Tagzania. One thing is for sure: The bestiary of georeferencing sites sure has grown this past year to contain some very varied specimens.

If you’re curious for more, Scott Melby is interviewed about Geonomy over on Profy. Interestingly, Scott also runs a wine blog — now georeferenced, of course. (Via The Blog Herald)

Last Friday, the WSJ reported that Microsoft and Ford are set to announce Sync at the Detroit auto show and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in the second week of January.

What is Sync? The WSJ calls it

A hands-free Bluetooth wireless system and in-vehicle operating system developed by Microsoft that will eventually be an option for its entire Ford brand lineup, according to people familiar with the matter.

The WSJ sees this as a necessary move for Microsoft to combat the lead Apple has with its in-car iPod connectors. But there is another motive for Microsoft to invade the car cockpit — one that’s just as good, if not better than a defensive move in the iPod stakes:

Localized search with in-car navigation.

Google and Volkswagen announced their collaboration on a navigation system based on Google Earth at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and had something to show for it by March, though it continues to be in development. (Some enthusiasts couldn’t wait and made their own.)

Microsoft finds it imperative to have a presence in cars, to keep both Apple and Google in check. But it’s not clear yet just how extensive the navigation functionality of Sync will be — the WSJ says only that “In many cases, the technology will be integrated into a navigation system.”

What is clear, however, is that if Microsoft comes up with something next week that does not in any way leverage its Virtual Earth 3D and/or Live Local capabilities, then it will have dropped the ball. Google Earth and Virtual Earth are like TomToms on steroids, and there is evidently strong demand for in-car navigation of this sort. Putting the map where most people use it (in the car) is obviously a good idea.

University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Matt Nolan has produced an online video that uses his research on Alaska’s McCall Glacier to explain the anatomy of a glacier and how glaciologists do their work. It had me watching with rapt attention. I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much about glaciers in so little time.

The video sets the bar for how virtual globes can be used as presentation tools. It also shows off nicely the abilities of EarthSLOT, a free virtual globe that Matt developed using Skyline’s TerraExplorer technology, and which he could thus customize with height mesh data that has a higher accuracy than Google Earth’s for the region:

But the video also whets the appetite for how virtual globes could and should be used as presentation tools, because what we really want to do is view such presentations in the virtual globe itself, with a scripted camera, a voiceover track, and layers or objects that load and unload at the appropriate time. Matt’s EarthSLOT has some of this functionality built in — you can download some components of the tour in the middle of this page (though without voice, for example: Matt added that in post-production for the video.)

Soon, conceivably, such a presentation might be delivered via a KML file that plays in Google Earth or a KML-compatible virtual globe. And when you’re done with the presentation, the contents of the KML file would be available as layers for you to explore at your leisure.

Such virtual globe presentation technology would be useful for much more than just science presentations. You could give guided tours of SketchUp houses or city neighborhoods, narrate your travels, or re-enact historical battles.

• In November, Google Earth Team’s Jessica Pfund gave a one-hour Google Tech Talk that serves as a great introduction to Google Earth, its user interface and the things you can do with it beyond looking at your house. The talk has now been posted to Google Video. I too learned something: Double right-clicking will zoom you out in Google Earth.

  The video is a link worth sending to anyone you know who still hasn’t caught the Google Earth bug (and who has a free hour). (Also, with hindsight, Jessica’s T-shirt was quite a hint about where Google would be acquiring next.) (Via SEO by the Sea)

• Another blogger likes the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator.
• If you use iGO navigation software for PocketPC or have a Mio GPS navigation device (both popular in Europe), then you might be interested in a point-of-interest (POI) Editor that lets you drag KML files (among others) to the app and thus to your device.

• DestinSharks’ Virgil Zetterlind is kind enough to host Intel’s demo game, Mars Sucks, on his server. Here is his blog post announcing the link. It’ll be up as long as it isn’t popular:-)
• Time Magazine’s Wilson Rothman likes 3DConnexion’s SpaceNavigator. But he finds it “annoying” that you can’t use it for anything besides Google Earth. A month ago nobody had even thought of navigating desktop applications in 3D, and now Rothman’s main “complaint” is that he can’t. Still, I guess it’s the kind of frustration you want customers to have.
• Remember that bogus website Download-Earth, which misappropriates Richard Treves’ Kokae tutorial screencasts of Google Earth without permission and then tries to get you to click on a paid referral link for Firefox, pretending it’s for Google Earth?

  Well now there is another site, Google Earth Tips 360, that has the exact same spiel. Once again, Richard Treves’s screencasts are used without permission, and once again, you are invited to download Google Earth by clicking on a referral link for downloading FireFox.

  

  There are some strange people out there.

• Garmin announces that their Training Centersoftware for their sports GPS devices is ready for the Mac, as promised earlier this year. It’ll be available at the MacWorld Expo Jan 8-12, and then as a download later in the month. The app integrates well with Motionbased.com, which already supports the Mac, and which lets you export KML.

• Gamasutra has a wonderful exposition of how to make a game using Google Earth as the interface, written by an Intel dev team (I thought they made chips?). The game itself is pretty similar to other scavenger-hunt type games we’ve seen on Google Earth before, but the article breaks the php code into manageable chunks, and provides the source code as well. This should be enough to let any enterprising person make their own geographic quizzes. (Via Digg)
• The Washington Post has an interesting article about virtual-world business models. Most of it is about Second Life, but the article also touches about some possible legal implications of the kind of in situ advertising Microsoft Virtual Earth does:
  

  Meanwhile, as mapping technologies rapidly improve, companies are increasingly able to transfer the real world to the online world. But are property rights any clearer in such a “real” virtual world?

  Microsoft, for instance, launched an online service last month called Virtual Earth that features highly detailed three-dimensional photographic maps of American cities. Microsoft plans to make money by selling advertising billboards in this virtual depiction of urban America.

  But the company’s lawyers and advertising executives are still grappling with the question of whether those who own the property depicted in Microsoft’s 3-D images have any control over how their depicted property is used online. For instance, does Federal Express have the right to object if an ad for its competitor DHL is posted in the parking lot at virtual FedEx Field?

  “We haven’t fully delineated all the guidelines for do’s and don’ts,” said Bobby Figueroa, a director of product management at Microsoft.

  (Via 3PointD)

• Oh, look, the actual XML Schema Definition (XSD) for KML 2.1 (via new Google employee Gregor Rothfuss’s Del.icio.us links)
• Swedish tabloids never fail to get a Google Earth story wrong. Aftonbladet a few days ago made a huge deal about how it “revealed” back in April that a secret Swedish spy base was visible on Google Earth. (The story was in fact broken on April 4 by Realtid.se, and carried by Aftonbladet two days later in mangled form.)

  Then Aftonbladet claims that a cloud was suddenly found over the base in Google Earth’s imagery the day after its “exposé”. (In actual fact, I still got a snapshot of the base on April 10. It’s the dataset update from April 19 that obscured the base with a cloud, as you can verify here. And there isn’t anything suspicious about this: The immediate result was wider coverage around Stockholm, albeit with a slightly cloudier image.)

  Finally, Aftonbladet announces that once again the base is visible — this on an article dated Dec 25, at least two dataset updates after the cloudless base data returned to Google Earth. My own theory is that it was quiet nightshift on Christmas eve, and that somebody on duty was surfing Google Earth until s/he got desperate for a story.

• Engadget linked to a system for manipulating 3D shapes called Imaginality Unleased, using nothing more than a webcam and some printed cutouts, by New Zealand’s MindSpace Solutions. it’s free to download and play with, and comes with its own virtual globe demo. (Haven’t tested it, sorry, I’m printer-free.)
• Not the first, but still rare enough to mention: A new GPS data logger by GlobalSat that outputs KML as well. Looks cute, so it could be a hit if the price is right.
• Got LabVIEW, that data acquisition and instrument control application, and do you have georeferenced data? In that case, somebody’s already done most of the work to help you visualize that data in Google Earth. Check out this thread.
• Google Earth Blog has a reminder that georeferenced Wikipedia articles are also available in languages other than English, just no as a default layer. Get them here.
• Wow, Nintendo’s Wii recently got a built-in “weather channel” with forecasts splayed across an actual moving virtual globe. Details here. Note to ESRI ArcGIS Explorer and Microsoft Virtual Earth: Even Wii manages to make the labels face the viewer rather than align with North.
• SketchUp is #15 on PC World’s list of the 20 most innovative products of the year. Even though it first became free last year:-)
• Finally, a quirky article in Germany’s Spiegel Online has their correspondent visiting the Google Earth team at the Google complex and getting an introduction to the application from general manager John Hanke, perceptively described as “the 40-year-old man”. The last part is especially interesting, however: The article accurately describes the differing 3D content strategies of Google and Microsoft, citing the pros and cons of each — if that’s the result of an off-the-record Google debriefing (the analysis isn’t sourced, suddenly), it would be the first clear indication that Google is indeed thinking along these lines.