• Google Earth Lessons is a great new resource for teachers to help use Google Earth in the class room. (Will update my links on the right with this and other finds when I’m back from vacation)
• Version 6.3 of MacGPS Pro, a GPS receiver interface for the Mac, adds Google Earth compatibility. (Via MacInTouch)
• Some updated versions of basic network link favorites: Global transparent cloud map and Wikipedia Places. The latter shows off OpenGIS support in MySQL 5, as reported here.
• Another report from what Indian army chief General J.J. Singh told reporters recently. He said that “we have taken steps and measures to deal with such exposures,” referring to Google Earth’s depiction of India. I assume this means the Indian military has begun building hangars for its fighter planes:-) (Here is the Times of India’s take.)
• New URL: Planet Geospatial is now at www.planetgs.com
• Eyebeam’s 3D capture tool OGLE is updated, and now has the ability to capture textures as well. Not yet useful for Google Earth, but it certainly is for other 3D authoring applications, and they’ll be able to export to Google Earth when Google Earth does do textures. (Via ReBang weblog)
• “FS Earth acts as an interface between Flight Simulator 2004 and Google Earth, letting to follow a flight in real time, over the satellite images generated by Google Earth.” (Via AvSim)
• Garmin Blogs. And does a good job of it too.

• GeoSpatial Experts’ GPS-Photo Link, a Windows georeferencing tool for photographs, adds Google Earth compatibility in the latest version.
• Another hint that India will go the route of trying to sponsor an international treaty, likely via the UN, to censor the resolution of satellite imagery made available to the public: India’s Army Chief General J.J. Singh says as much, reported by the Indo-Asian News Service. What a terrible idea. While we’re at it, why not also censor maps globally, by treaty? Why force the world to adopt the lowest common denominator when it comes to governmental paranoia?
• Another article about the Indian government’s displeasure with Google Earth, by DailyTech. Fact check: Australia has not complained about Google Earth, nor has Russia. Commenters take the article to task for other misconceptions, sort of.
• A new online marketing campaign uses Google Earth to promote the global DVD release of King Kong. www.findskullisland.com uses network links and overlays to place each “level” of the online “game” in geographic context. (Press release in German)

• Preliminary hearings in the patent-infringement suit brought against Google Earth by Skyline Software Systems appear to have the judge siding with Google when deciding on definitions for terms to be used during the suit. CNet says this bodes well for Google Earth.
• A wonderful op-ed piece in The Indian Express about why censoring Google Earth would be a terrible idea. Among the many good points made:
  

  Censoring net access is simply not an option for India. We are not China. We should not think of putting filters or of asking Google to block its service from Indian IP addresses. Not even if Google is happy to do so — and that’s the second point. Google caved in to Chinese demands on censoring its services inside China. That shameful cop-out robbed Google of a great deal of moral authority on issues of censorship. Democratic governments must take the lead.

From Google Earth’s official bulletin board:

March 31: We have added a very recent 3″/pixel inset for Las Vegas (March, 2006). In addition:

added/restored Koh Tao and several other islands in Thailand

removed black seam in Massachusetts

minor changes in Munich

minor changes in Mumbai and Chandigarh

[Update 18:41 UTC. Following a tip-off from Jim in the comments, some eyecandy from the truly amazing resolution for Las Vegas:

India’s CNN-IBN television news channel interviews India’s Deputy National Security Adviser Vijay Nambiar about the government’s continuing attempts to censor publicly available high resolution images of India, of the kind licensed by Google for Google Earth.

Let’s first get out of the way the fact that the tone of the reporter, Surya Gangadharan, is not neutral, nor factually correct:

Google Earth captured these images and put them on the internet for the world to see. And it publicised these pictures without even consulting India. Not surprisingly, the Indian security establishment isn’t amused.

But what did Nambiar have to say?

CNN-IBN: How serious a security issue is this?

Nambiar: There are certain security parameters to be met and we have been discussing these in the committee of secretaries as to how we can directly get in touch with Google and other organisations to see our basic security environment is safeguarded. It is a basic principle that if satellite pictures are taken over a particular country, then the permission of that country has to be taken.

CNN-IBN: What can be done to ensure this does not recur. Are we looking at an agreement with Google?

Nambiar: It has to be an international agreement. Individual companies or individual parties should adhere to certain common standards and there should be some kind of action should be taken when these standards are violated.

When Nambiar maintains there exists “a basic principle”, he is presumably referring to Principles Relating to Remote Sensing of the Earth from Outer Space, a UN General Assembly resolution from 1986, a time when only states engaged in satellite imaging, predominantly for spying. UN General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and not a source of international treaty law, but presumably the tack Nambiar and his committee will take is that this resolution embodies customary practice, and hence can be construed as customary international law.

The problem with such a line of argumentation is that the resolution, like most other General Assembly resolutions, does not in fact reflect long-standing practice, from which customary international law might be derived. (General Assembly resoolutions are usually aspirational in nature.) Nambiar and the Indian government would have to show there has been a long and continuous record of governmental protest against private companies acquiring and selling satellite imagery. And there isn’t. Six months of being upset in response to some jingoistic newsreporting about images that have been around for over a decade does not international law make.

Nambiar furthermore hints that he would like to enshrine this supposed custom in some kind of “international agreement”, treaty law that would be a source of international law and thus binding on its signatories. But the actors in such treaties are governments, not companies, and I think it highly unlikely the US would willingly place such draconian curbs on its many satellite imaging companies.

[Update 17:51 UTC: Vijay Nambiar was recently appointed as a special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. This could be a further hint as to what the international policy intentions of the Indian government are for putting the technology genie back in its bottle.]

[Update 18:21 UTC: Here is a post from December 2005 about a Christian Science Monitor article that mentions the General Assembly treaty.]

• Tim Beerman has been blogging the impending release of his Shape2Earth plugin for MapWindow, an open source GIS viewer. Here is some eyecandy of converted Shapefiles made with Shape2Earth, which is currently being beta-tested. Here is a walkthrough of a typical process for converting Shapefiles into Google Earth.



• Now that Google Earth has high-resolution data for Germany, it’s worth building 3D structures on top of it. Behold Bamberg Cathedral, on Google Earth Hacks.
• Google Earth Blog notes some further undocumented improvements to the dataset for Google Earth, as listed by an eagle-eyed Google Earth Community member. Checking Kampala (Uganda), it is now indeed in high resolution (which it wasn’t when last I visited just over a week ago) and — with less certainty now — large strips in South Africa have gone high resolution, which I don’t believe were there before. It is great to see the developing world, including India, being given a higher priority in the data updates.
• GPSLodge reports on the new Navman GPS devices out today, whose main distinguishing feature is a 1.3 megapixel camera. Nothing to write home about, camera-wise, but surely this “gadget mashup” is the leading edge of a trend? It should result in far more georeferenced content showing up on Flickr et. al. sometime soon. (On the other extreme end of the georeferenced photo product spectrum is the new Nikon D200, which can optionally connect to a GPS device via a cable to have it fed geodata into a photograph’s metadata.)

I’m in Switzerland for a week on vacation, so posting will be sporadic, depending on how close the cybercafés are to the ski slopes. And how the global warming is progressing. Meanwhile,

• View the Sydney Gold Coast Yacht Race live in Google Earth, using the same technology as the Sydney Hobart race from a couple of months ago. The race starts on April 1. (Press release.)
• Geoff Zeiss provides further coverage of Map Middle East 2006 in Dubai, including on Google Earth CTO Michael Jones’s speech.