From nil to The New Yorker in 365 days, Ogle Earth first saw the light of day exactly one year ago with this post, where I explained the aims of this blog:

This microblog is going to serve as a record of my explorations using the holy grail of atlases, Google Earth. Ogle Earth will contain links to tutorials, links to interesting new layers and markers, and my own contributions as well. I will also be musing on new uses Google Earth might be put to, and chronicle innovative contributions as they happen. In other words, this blog exists to disseminate what I learn about and with Google Earth.

Eight hundred and twelve posts later, that turned out to be pretty accurate, save for the “micro” part. It’s been a great ride, to a large extent because of the many creative people I’ve gotten to know along the way. Let’s see what the coming year brings. [Note: this is the annual pat-on-my-own-back post. You’ll be spared another until mid-2007.]

I’m not done yet catching up with the backblog that’s built up while I took a quick holiday, but here is a first stab at interesting remaindered links:

• The Wall Street Journal looks at some of SketchUp’s competitors in the DIY architectural modelling space: Software lets you unlock your inner architect. Some of the cautionary tales about letting the client run rampant with these tools are quite funny… if you’re not the contractor.
• More comparative screenshots from GéoPortail and Google Maps. Includes examples of censorship in Géoportail.
• AutoDesk Labs released KML exporters for AutoCAD 2007-based products (last week, on June 28. I’m playing catch-up, clearly). Here is a screencast showing how it works — the functionality is similar to how SketchUp integrates with Google Earth.
• It looks like Mac OS X 10.5, AKA Leopard, may boast some deep integration with mapping and GPS, according to AppleInsider, a rumor blog that can be accurate.

I’ve just stumbled across Quikmaps (beta), a web app that uses the Google Maps API to let you scribble on maps in a variety of ways and then save them and share them. As soon as I started playing with Quikmaps it became clear this is an impressive piece of programming, but it is useful as well, and very intuitive. It took me no time at all to draw my daily bike commute to work, adding interesting sites along the way.

The map I made is here, but Quikmaps also gave me the code so I can embed it thus (this seems to wreak some havoc with the javascript for Google ads at the moment):

The real clincher, however, is the fact that whatever I make with Quikmaps gets an automatic KML link for Google Earth, like so. Bravo!

This is one of just a few Google Maps-based applications that I can see spontaneously returning to when I need to make a quick map — an apt name indeed. Make sure to take it for a spin yourself. (Via GIS Geoblog)

Ooh, Google Earth-friendly Panoramio has new features, writes Eduardo Manchon:

• Suggest new location: Since there are many people correcting wrong

  located photos we decided to create a new feature called “Suggest new

  location”. We will take a look at the suggested location and accept or

  refuse it. This feature is only working few days, but already many

  photos have been corrected.

• Photos with geodata in EXIF are automatically located in Panoramio.

  You don’t need to do anything but upload the photo when it has the

  coordinates included in EXIF. There are many tools to edit EXIF data,

  but it is specially interesting since the last version of Picasa

  includes a geotagging feature that adds geodata to EXIF.

• Map photos directly by coordinates: When you want to locate a photo,

  instead of writing the name of the place and browsing the map, you can

  type the coordinates in decimal or sexagesimal format. Now it’s just

  available in the “suggest new location” feature, soon we will add it

  to the upload page.

The suggest new location feature is a very nice addition; let’s just hope it scales well:-) I also like the implicit cooperation between EXIF-aware Picasa and Panoramio.

The UK’s Times online has a longish article that details many of the censored bits in Géoportail, trying hard not to engage in a bit of needling along the way:

Millions of French internet users are zooming in on aerial views of their holiday houses with a new state web service, but not Jacques Chirac.

The Château de Bity, a country home in the Corrèze that the President rarely visits, is blanked out, along with the surrounding village.

Etc… Elsewhere, the Times gets its facts quite wrong:

At the request of the US Government, Google blurs detail on a few American locations, including the residence of Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, but not the White House. India, Israel and other states have also put pressure on Google to hide sites that could be valuable to enemies or terrorists, but nowhere have so many zones simply been blanked out as on Geoportail’s France.

Just to set the record straight, then: Google doesn’t censor its imagery. It buys imagery from providers that are subject to national laws, but it is quite free to shop around for the best data, and often it does so. Nor have India, Israel or any other country successfully lobbied Google to remove or censor content in its database, as far as I know. Why is it that this particular piece of information can be almost relied upon to be misreported?

Jeremy Cothran, sensor web innovator, has been hard at work making it easier for ocean data platform operators to georeference their online data in Google Earth. He’s managed to automate the process by turning it into a free HTTP web service. Jeremy Explains:

I’ve put together a google based visualization tool for a basic observation catalog visualization via kml/google earth. Folks can either download and modify the base scripts or use it as an http service which when supplied a basic CSV file and observation types list produces a KML file. More technical details are listed here. [Just cancel out of the password request, twice.]

Might be useful for encouraging/engaging other observation systems to list their assets via KML. We are struggling as a community to provide some consistent metadata (xml schemas, controlled vocabularies/codelists, web services) across our organizations and I’m hoping KML and its easy visualizations can help provide some incentive (a carrot) towards this.

Here is a sample by Jeremy of his web service (hover over the link to see its guts), made from two referenced content files. Very smooth indeed. And so is this: That exact same link can be pasted into Google Maps to produce a Maps version of the KML. I’m still amazed Google Maps can do that. It doesn’t get much easier than this:-)

Both Chris Holmes and Brian Timoney wrote in to make sure I blogged the release of GeoServer 1.3.2 today (press release). As I’m easing back into the blogging after that lovely little break, I thought I might let them do the explaining, as their emails are succinct and articulate:

Chris Holmes writes:

I work on GeoServer, an open source server of geospatial information. I noticed you caught the KML support in our last release. I was wondering if you might post a bit more about our latest release. The thing of note is obiously KML/KMZ output, so you can connect with a network link. This work was actually partially sponsored by Google themselves, in order to make life easier on people looking to expose data on Google Earth. Instead of having everyone write their own network link software from scratch it made sense to just fund an existing, solid open source server.

GeoServer has been around for a few years, and the community has written connectors for PostGIS, ArcSDE, DB2, Oracle Spatial, MySQL, Shapefiles and more. It produces maps and raw spatial data in a variety of formats through open WFS and WMS standards. The Google Network Link works quite well with WMS, so we just made things easier to connect with a built-in KML reflector, and made KML/KMZ as one of the output formats. So it’ll be most useful for power users, who have lots of data to get out, where a single KML file might slow GE too much.

There is also a feature to let users decide if they want Placemarks or Ground Overlay representations of the same data. So we’ve put a good amount in to making it easy to make network links, and as an open source project others can help contribute to grow even more advanced GE capabilities, such as 2.5d and 3d data serving, and support for streaming in KML 2.1

I work for a non-profit called The Open Planning Project, and we basically do this to make spatial information more available, for things like urban planning and beyond. Google Earth is obviously a great visualization engine, so we’re excited to interoperate with it. Anyways, I hope this might be of interest for your readers.

Brian Timoney makes these points in his email:

Other than GE 4/KML 2.1 I think this is a very important development for the following:

1. The implementation of KML as an output combined with the number of enterprise back-ends that it connects to: Oracle, DB2, PostGIS, and most intriguingly–ArcSDE.
2. A tighter connection between KML and the WMS/WFS standards.
3. The fact that Google contributed $$$ to the latest development effort

Between Google kicking money GeoServer’s way along with the added functionality of KML 2.1, I’ve been heartened by the attention to enhancing the abilities to stream ‘big data’ through the interface without resorting to the Enterprise/Fusion options…

It leaves me wondering how GeoServer compares with ESRI’s ArcIMS. It’s an honest question — is GeoServer now good enough for a good chunk of the server needs that were previously met by ArcIMS? Any GIS pros care to weigh in?

I ask only because Google’s support for GeoServer looks like a similar competitive play to ESRI making ArcGIS Explorer free. With a free ArcGIS Explorer, Google can’t really develop an entry-level analysis tool and expect to charge for it. With a free GeoServer, ESRI might find it hard to continue asking money for ArcIMS. (That’s my theory — in fact, it was touched upon in this post from February 2006 that is worth rereading — especially Brian Timoney’s comment, where he wrote, (prophetically?), “For me though, the real breakthrough coming up in the next 18 months is the direct linkage of interfaces (such as Google Earth) to backend spatial database.”)