It’s past 2am on a Monday morning in Paris, and Géoportail is still not giving me maps. I’ve read somewhere (sorry, link lost) that it may take up to a week to muster the necessary resources, and/or that a password system may need to be introduced to limit access.

Meanwhile, Alexis Kartmann at Coma Informatique posts a link to the YouTube video of how Géoportail was introduced on the (French) news… The news footage shows a working 2D Géoportail, except that it’s not geoportail.fr, it’s the mapping application for the French yellow pages, made by Mappy, that Alexis has been working on since the start of the year. Alexis points out that while the imagery is IGN’s (the French government’s National Geographic Institute), the interface and backend are their own.

Yes, that’s right, the French yellow pages (Pages Jaunes, a publicly traded company) has the exact same image dataset as Géoportail, but you can go there now (click on the guy with the magnifying glass) and see all of France at 50cm resolution, with no ifs, ands or buts. Also, it has a cool smooth zooming feature. Ça alors!

Finally, a replacement for the now-defunct Geobloggers, and it’s called Geofeeder: An automatically refreshing network link in Google Earth for all the closest geotagged Flickr photos. Although it’s billed as an alpha, Geofeeder works great, and the people we have to thank are Planet 9 Studios, which provides 3D services to businesses.

(Those who have been around since the start of Ogle Earth will remember Dan Catt’s Geobloggers, a pioneer Google Maps mashup that mapped geotagged Flickr items and which served them to Google Earth. Geobloggers went away when Dan went to work at Yahoo!, and we’ve been waiting for a replacement.)

Planet 9 studios show their prowess by other means as well. This demo page links to a textured Transamerica tower in San Francisco, and the really adventurous types can try the 20MB-large textured neighborhood around the tower. (Mileage may vary, as Google Earth 4 is in beta, remember.)

France’s national mapping site Géoportail launched on Friday. French President Jacques Chirac made a speech on the occasion, covered by Reuters, in which he stressed the need for a national map site, though not for the sake of the consumer, curiously:

[…] Chirac stressed the need for France to have such a site […] saying the state had to be at the cutting edge of modern technology.

“It is also a case of economics,” Chirac was quoted by his office as saying […]

So Géoportail is great for the state, and for economics. Meanwhile, Géoportail has been down or dog slow for exactly as long as it’s been live, crushed by what an apologetic message on the site calls “several milion connections in a few hours” — probably pesky visitors encouraged by the main evening news to go check out their house.

Some free advice, then, to France’s National Geographic Institute (IGN), makers of Géoportail:

• If you have your president launch your website, you will definitely get lots of visitors.
• Don’t launch a generic 2D online map of France — what amounts to a stop-gap measure as you ready your 3D browser for later this year — and hype it in the international press as your response to Google Earth. People will be disappointed. Many of them will already have Google Earth. They know what it is.
• In sum, perhaps you should also have imitated Google’s habit of calling initial launches betas. Humility has the added benefit of lowering expectations.

Meanwhile, Google Earth’s latest data update shows many of France’s overseas island territories at a similar resolution as the 2 pixels per meter on Géoportail. If you live in rural European France, Géoportail will have better images than Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps or Microsoft Live Local… if you can get in. But for people living in French cities or French terittories overseas, try Google Earth first.

Wait, there’s more just in. Le Monde has a detailed article out today (in French) about the political mess this project has engendered behind the scenes. Some interesting points:

• Géoportail censors French strategic and military sites, which Le Monde has verified are visible in high detail in Google Earth. In other words, Géoportail is good for pinpointing which sites are worth taking a closer look at with Google Earth.
• The site was launched a week earlier than initially planned, to coincide with an announcement by three French ministers regarding an agreement about the future course of French GIS. Perhaps they wanted to go on vacation?
• IGN is not the only state entity involved in the Géoportail project — it is responsible for the imagery, but not for the other official layers that are mooted to eventually be available. IGN has nevertheless been speeding ahead with a 2D Géoportail without really consulting others. According to Le Monde, it considers Géoportail to be an excellent oportunity to sell more maps. The other partners — most notably the Office of Geological and Mineral Research (BRM) — see it more as a public platform to which they can publish their cadastral data, and resent IGN for its opportunism. Then there is also the problem of integrating all these data layers. Apparently, the necessary coöperation to make this happen hasn’t yet materialized. Nut graf (translated):
  

  It is as if the effect of Google Earth was to rekindle the ceaseless turf wars of French GIS, where everyone defends its borders by accusing neighbors of the blackest intentions. “I have never seen such an environment”, confided one participant of the interdepartmental meetings, which resulted in pressure to sign a cease-fire in the form of a charter signed in extremis.

• Still, the roadmap is clearer now: a 3D version of Géoportail in the autumn with some simple layers, and then an enhanced version, with “rich and varied” layers, in 2007.

(An aside: Curiously, Le Monde introduces Géoportail as an attempt by France to redress the relative scarcity of high resolution imagery of France in Google Earth — it talks of Géoportail restoring the “national honor”. I’m not sure if this is an official motivation for the site, or a journalistic flourish. If this was an actual concern, IGN could have donated the imagery to Google, though now that we know it’s censored, I’m not so sure if I’d want it.)

[Update 10:50 UTC: The International Herald Tribune today has an article with a great quote from IGN explaining the launch fiasco:

“It’s just temporary,” said Bernard Delbey, a spokesman for IGN. “We are surprised and proud of the interest people are showing in the Web site.”

On Friday, French President Jacques Chirac will inaugurate Géoportail, the much-hyped (in France) response to Google Earth. So maintains Pipilogue Pipologue, which together with another blogger was able to sneak in and post some screenshots.

All those screenshots show is a Google Maps clone. If that is the full product being launched tomorrow, I will be very underwhelmed, and Géoportail will have been quite the PR stunt. Other European countries have long had web-based high-resolution national mapping and imagery services — one fine example is the Swiss; the Swedes have at least two free ones. And all these are commercial ventures, not requiring a head of state to launch; France’s Géoportail is produced by the Institut Géographique National (IGN), a state entity.

IGN, meanwhile, has come in for some strong criticism in an article (in French) on a French GIS news site (Thanks, Declan!). Apparently, Géoportail is still being developed in an ongoing state of confusion about its intended goals — notably, there is still no agreement among different steering committees about how much data should be made free. All this is providing grist for a good old-fashioned turf war, reports the article.

AFP confirms the launch for Friday (minus the Chirac tidbit). Look for it at www.geoportail.fr. I won’t be able to, as I am soon off to an island in the Baltic, celebrating the national holiday of the summer solstice on Friday June 23 with lots of Swedes. In case you’re wondering, Swedes prefer 3-day weekends over pinpoint astronomical accuracy — druids everywhere are appalled.

Previous articles about Géoportail on Ogle Earth

• Two product updates of note:
  • KMLer, an ArcGIS 9 extension for exporting and importing KML, is now up to version 1.2 and supports KML 2.1’s levels-of-detail and region functionality. There’s a 7-day free trial version.
  • Photo georeferencing PC application RoboGeo is up to version 4.1. This is no mere point release, however. The most exciting new feature is the ability to associate live dictation or sound with images, and then to export the recording with the images to Google Earth, ready for playback. There are many other new features to read through. There is a demo available.
• GIS for Archaeology and CRM blogs and then links to a nice example of KML for archaeological outrach — the Sagalassos dig in Turkey.
• James Fee continues his preview screenshots of ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, the geobrowser whose public beta is due by the end of June. Today, the startup page. I’m not sure I’m as excited as James by the ability to skin the ArcGIS Explorer, though. Skinning is a superficial pursuit, pun intended.

You may have noticed the posting frequency has dropped precipitously here on Ogle Earth. That’s because the World Cup has been competing with GIS for my spare time — boy was it difficult to concentrate on GeoTagThings yesterday while England played Sweden. An additional challenge is that I’ve lived for a year or more in eight of the 32 countries partaking, so my frayed national loyalties are making for stressful viewing. I really am not a watcher of spectator sports, but I do allow myself this quadrennial spate of irrational exuberance.

Nevertheless, there is interesting news that touches on Google Earth about, so here’s another post that’s long on links and short on analysis.

• Development Seed Blog is working on a geocoding module for the Drupal CMS, and is looking for feedback. Support fort Google Earth is of course part of the plan. It’s interesting to see how the module allows for the possibility of multiple placemarks per post. Screenshot 1, 2. (Via Willy Dobbe).
• Zmarties looks at how Picasa communicates with Google Earth — basically, Picasa acts as a web server to Google Earth, which lets Google Earth send Picasa information via an updating network link. (See? No ActiveX required.)
• New releases: Version 2.2.0 of Ge-Graph by rsgrillo. KML 2.1 compatible, for Windows, with some very nice looking screenshots. Download here. Mmm, pretty:

  

• James Fee is such a tease when it comes to ArcGIS Explorer beta screenshots.
• Interesting tactical move: Microsoft’s Virtual Earth engineers are moving to embrace GeoRSS, probably because it isn’t KML:
  

  The VE team is very committed to providing great support for GeoRSS, both in our map control for display and data access, as well as tools for publishing your own GeoRSS feeds. Stay tuned for more on that in the future. […] If you’re a developer working with GeoRSS, or a publisher with ideas for tools to make your life easier, we’d love to hear from you.

  So soon we’ll have a situation where Virtual Earth can read and display just GeoRSS, while Google Maps can read and display just KML. I’d love to be able to paste a GeoRSS feed URL into Google Maps and have it display &mfash; it can’t be nearly as hard to do as it was for KML. Why not support both? They’re hardly competing formats.

• Track your kids live in Google Earth with the GlobalSat TR-101 GPS:
  

  Basically the TR-101 can send the exact position of your kids by SMS or by GPRS over the internet at any time, but it can also be used as a phone with the possibility to record up to 3 different telephone numbers.

• Frank at Google Earth Blog has a good way of making your hours spent in front of Google Earth pay: Find new surfing spots for prizes.
• Map and GIS News Blog for UK, Europe and World hits the radar.
• Standalone command-line shareware app csv2kml converts CSV files into KML.
• Leursism finds the first naked person in Google Earth that I am aware of. Either that or an alien.

There are web services that associate placenames with coordinates, like Tageo, GeoNames and Maplandia, and then make the placenames browsable by geographic criteria.

There are also web services that associate web URLs with coordinates, and then make these URLs browsable by geographic criteria: GeoURL was among the first, letting website authors add geotags to page headers, and then indexing these sites. A variation on this theme is the georeferencing of URLs created specifically for uploaded files of a certain type — Panoramio does this for photos, Freesound does it for recorded ambient sounds. Pin in the map, meanwhile, eschews findability for simplicity: Give it a coordinate pair, you get a URL back.

Tagzania is a more complicated beast. It lets you attach all sorts of metadata to a coordinate pair — tags, URLs (including of photos), a description — and this collection of associations is then too given a permalink URL. All tags and authors have their own KML and RSS feeds.

Now there is geotagthings.com. Where might it fit in? What’s so innovative about it?

For one thing, there is a change of emphasis vs. Tagzania. In Tagzania, you start with a location on the map, then attach a URL, if you like. In geotagthings, you start with the URL, then go to the map to georeference it. In this respect it is much like GeoURL, except that the work is done by users, rather than by authors. Geotagthings doesn’t do non-geospatial tags for URLs — del.icio.us already has that niche covered.

What’s innovative in geotagthings, however, is how it exploits the user-generated geotagging data: You can set up a feed that returns all most recent URLs georeferenced to within a specific geographic area — a circular catchment area with a user-set radius.

I’m looking forward to the day when newsfeed readers let me set up alerts for GeoRSS-enhanced content associated with specific geographic regions. Geotagthings.com, meanwhile, already offers the geographic equivalent to services I use today to find new stories for Ogle Earth: Just as I save searches for “KML”, “KMZ” and other terms in popular blog aggregators as news feeds, geotagthings.com lets me save searches for content associated with a specific region as a news feed. In my future newsfeed reader, geotagthings.com feeds will serve as a geographic safety net, just as my “KML” search term feeds ensure I don’t miss a relevant story if it isn’t covered by the blogs i follow.

This makes geotagthings.com an important new tool among the georeferencing services available online. But it’s still late-alpha-early-beta, so there is room for further polishing. Here are some suggestions from my own use:

• Yahoo! maps returns its map tiles too slowly, and in Europe the detail is very scarce compared to other ajax mapping services. Finding a place on the map takes too long.
• The feeds are still bit rough around the edges. I wish the feeds were clickable rather than just cut-and-pastable. In any case, Newsgator won’t accept them as they are, currently.
• How spam-resilient is geotagthings.com? GeoURL seems to have a lot of automatically generated content. I’m guessing geotagthings.com will be better insulated agains spam, as you need to register to contribute, and abusers would presumably have all their content removed along with their account, in one fell swoop.
• If geotagthings.com were to automaticaly use the information already found in GeoURL’s header geotags when adding a site via the bookmarklet, this would greatly speed up the process.
• Geotagthings.com’s feeds are created dynamically, from coordinate parameters in the feed’s URL. This means it would be trivial to return a KML file for a bounding box when updating a network link. This makes it possible to browse the geotagthings.com database by roaming Google Earth.

Overall, I think geotagthings,com can become a very useful service, depending on how often users find the time to geotag URLs they come across on the web.

(Via VerySpatial, GeoLibro and Slashgeo)