Bloody hell it’s hot here in Cambridge. Sure, I’ve been in heat like this before, in New York City and Spain and the Sinai and the Australian outback, but those places expect the heat, and come air conditioned or wrapped in thick walls and shuttered windows, or are sensibly empty of people.

In the East Village at the height of summer, even the skankiest bars have the air conditioning humming, and in my more bohemian days it was definitely cheaper to pay for coolness in beers at bars than in electrical bills (and beers) at home in a tenement walkup. English pubs — even those with wireless access — have yet to discover that cold interiors attract customers.

All this by way of explaining that it is too hot to blog Google Earth tonight. I was all ready to have a go at documenting the Lebanon-Israel conflict in KML (why are no news organizations taking the lead? This is the first war of the geobrowser era) but, well, I’m just in a whiny mood instead. I might have a go during the weekend.

In the meantime, enjoy this ditty by Noel Coward (.wav). Lyrics below the fold.

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• Uwe Hermann notices that you could anonymize your surfing with Google Earth using Tor, should you be so inclined…
• Are the pyramids at Giza lined up in the same pattern as the stars of the belt of Orion? Over on Flickr, “933K” superimposes a picture he took of Orion’s belt onto Google Earth to check for himself…
• New Google Earth Blog hits the radar screen: Google’s Earth.
• Ooh, Ah. BLDG|BLOG finds a very cool NASA Earth Observatory 3D visualization of a storm front over the Pacific. The animation is worth watching — I wonder how long it will take before that plays live in a geobrowser near you.

I just now revisited the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog, which posts its content exclusively to Google Earth, only to find that all of Gombe National Park on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in western Tanzania is now in glorious high resolution. This must have happened in the data update from a month ago. It makes visiting this blog all the more worthwile.

But the enhanced resolution also drives home that Gombe Chimpanzee Blog could really use a makeover. It already has the content, which is the hardest part. Why not deliver the posts via a network link, so that we can subscribe? And why not add to this network link some static overlays that identify the main villages and most frequented spaces, so that mentions of them in a post aren’t as cryptic? With the improved resolution, all this now really matters. With a few hours of invested time, this blog could really become the alpha male of georeferenced blogging.

Open Source posts about the budding social spying phenomenom — in this case, it’s North Korean military sites being identified on Google Earth Community.

The quote by the retired US veteran isn’t accurate, however. No country has successfully requested or coerced Google to censor or remove data, Google has confirmed. Governments can and do coerce their satellite imaging companies to censor data, and indeed US satellite companies are obliged by law to ensure they do not sell imagery of Israel that is of a higher resolution than non-American vendors. But Google doesn’t have to buy from them. (Via Boing Boing).

(Previously: Social spying in Cuba, Iran, China.)

After last week’s attempt to create directional vector graphics for Google Earth, a commenter left a note saying that you can in fact control the heading of an icon, which would solve most of the problems posed. I just had a go playing with the <heading> tag under <iconstyle>, and it does indeed work, sort of.

My aim just now was to recreate in Google Earth the weather symbols that meteorologists often use, such as these (from which I stole the graphics). Again, I didn’t intend to do a good job; I wanted to see if it’s possible.

These weather symbols have two main components — wind speed/direction and percentage cloud cover. Only the wind speed/direction has a directional component to it, so I decided to split the symbol into two overlaid icons, with only the wind component being fixed by a <heading> tag. (This has the added advantage of needing to create far fewer symbols, because you can mix and match different components.)

Here are some examples.

The result is that while the cloud cover icon is always “right side up” like conventional icons, the wind icon will point in the direction dictated by the <heading> tag — though only accurately if you look at these icons from directly above. View them at an angle, and the direction is only accurate every 90 degrees as you rotate.

(Note: I used the ruins of Taxila — an ancient Buddhist seat of learning and a town populated by Alexander the Great — as the backdrop for the test icons. Download the KMZ file for an added “feature” I discovered while veering off the beaten path there, oh, 12 years ago. No guarantee it’s still there, though the stuff did grow wild everywhere.)

• Education technologist Bob Kaehms is working on integrating the Drupal content management system with Google Earth, with the aim of creating a teaching aid:
  

  I’m looking for teachers to work with to create some geospatial based content. My ultimate goal is to make the work (eventually) available as a drupal module.

• Intriguing news: NASA World Wind’s developers are making a major push to beef up support for KML, report both The Earth is Square and Bull’s Rambles. (This includes the rendering of 3D KML buildings, though it doesn’t look like SketchUp models are supported.)

  I think this is World Wind’s most important task right now — although World Wind add-on content modules are impressive, they are hard to make and hard to tweak, and this works against their wider adoption. KML, and especially the network link, is a stroke of genius in that it can very easily be manufactured on demand, in real time, by server-side applications.

• This site looks a bit spammy at first (like, who clicks on content like that?) but WorldWindData.com seems to offer legit sizable cache packs for World Wind, free. (Scroll down.)
• If you want to get a feel for how important Google Earth has been to brand Google, check out this Google trends graph:

  

University of Southern California’s Julian Bleecker has a very interesting summer project going: Playing Battleships using Google Earth as a game board, but with the twist that you have to physically visit the location on the board you want to attack, using your mobile phone to “call in” a strike.

There have been previous instances of real-time mobile gaming using phones, but this is the first time I’ve seen Google Earth used in the process. Julian has an interesting notion to describe this kind of gaming: It’s a “1st Life/2nd Life mashup”, in that real-world actions impact the state of a virtual world.

Implementation is rather spotty, but it doesn’t matter at all — this is a brave new use for Google Earth, and one that makes absolute sense, with hindsight: Because Google Earth aspires to be a mirror world, it will always be open to receiving inputs from the real world, as there is a one-to-one correlation between places on Earth and places on Google Earth. This happens to be the main difference between the likes of Google Earth and imaginary virtual worlds like Second Life; Julian’s Battleships proof of concept drives this home.

Going somewhat speculative, now: The next generation of mobile phones will know exactly where you are and will be able to tell it to you, to your mobile applications, to your trusted friends (and to operators and the government). The opportunities for feeding your location to a mobile Google Maps and to Google Earth are self-evident. I think this is why so much effort is being expended by Google, Yahoo! et al to secure a place on your mobile’s screen now for both maps and search. In the future, your mobile phone will be your avatar cum concierge cum beacon. The only question is, whose software will you be using? I reckon that the company with the best global base map will be at a natural advantage.