Just noticed that the latest Beta builds of the Garmin MapSource software support Google Earth natively. (Via)

Here is another amazing use for Google Earth network links that is completely new to me: Seeadlerpost.com has been tracking a whale shark named Schroeder through the Indian ocean using satellite tags. The shark is headed towards Somalia via a slightly erratic route, and you can follow its progress on Google Earth using this KMZ link.

What an imaginative way to build awareness of both animal behaviour and the studies being done on them! How great would it be to be able to turn on tracking for migratory birds, for whales, and perhaps time-delayed tracking for elephants and great apes (to flummox poachers)? It would be yet another must-have component of any school curriculum studying the animal kingdom.

(The whale shark has been named Schroeder in honor of the German chancellor — who said scientists don’t have a sense of humor?) (Via GEH)

Heard of EarthSLOT? I hadn’t. It’s run by Dr. Matt Nolan at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with support from the National Science Foundation and it’s billed as a “3D GIS and visualization application designed to allow scientists, educators, and the public better understand our planet and the earth-science that goes on here.” It looks a lot like Google Earth. It’s even in Beta, just like Google Earth.

EarthSLOT is actually built on Skyline Software‘s TerraExplorer and their TerraGate server. This means it won’t run on my Mac, not even in Virtual PC, but there are some seriously goodlooking screenshots to look at. The most noticable difference from Google Earth I can see from these images is that 3D buildings can have quite complex shapes as well as pictures along the sides. There is also an interesting use of the application to display traditionally non-spatial data in a spatial way.

There is a lot of Arctic and Antarctic data, which makes EarthSLOT a promising way to explore those regions in detail. Overall, I suspect the main weakness of this public and free demonstration is scalability. Maybe it’s best that we keep this one amongst ourselves.

New uses & tools

Sportsim integrates ESRI ArcWeb with Google Earth. James Fee likes it.

Flyr. Search flickr for geotagged photos and display them in Google Earth (or Maps).

A trucker finds Google Earth very useful for his work.

Google Earth Art

Anyone found the giant pink bunny yet in Google Earth?

Art Tracking Module 002

Hurricane Rita

A digest of overlays at Google Earth Community.

A very informative overlay by Ivo Janssen.

Interesting articles

Geobloggers: Location Based geoSpam and geoAdvertising

Xeni Jardin in Wired: CNN Hacks New TV Technology¨Ü

It’s not just CNN: Dutch NOS TV news also uses Google Earth [Dutch].

Kathryn Cramer: Deploying Google Earth Toward a New Relationship with History: The Case of Hiroshima

Remember how Luca Mori discovered a Roman villa using Google Maps? NASA wants a piece of the PR action too. On September 29, The location of Homer’s home island Ithaca will be announced, having apparently been found with NASA’s World Wind, says this breathless press release.

Conferences

Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) is planning to hold its first online convention (and trade show) from October 1 to December 31. One of the speakers will be Jack Dangermond, head of ESRI. (I’m not sure how that works.)

Call for papers for the Virtual Globes Session at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, March 7-11, 2006, Chicago, Illinois.

GeoWeb 2006, Vancouver, Canada July 24 ÇƒÏ July 28, 2006.

Google Blog: The illuminated continent (National Geographic comes to Google Earth)

Keyhole Community: September 16: Major Data Announcement (new high-resolution updates)

Blog Google Earth, or see Paris? Hmm…

Google Maps Mania links to two Google Maps projects, Your History Here and PlaceOpedia, both by UK-based mysociety.org.

One seems to be a lot more useful than the next. PlaceOpedia exists as a way for users to manually link places on a Google Map with Wikipedia articles about those places. Not to be negative, but isn’t this a task ripe for automation? That’s how the Germans did it two months ago.

Your History Here makes a lot more sense, because here the user gets to generate her own personal historical recollections about a place, which turns the site into a unique living historical trove. That’s a great idea.

The point of this post, however, was to point out that both sites export their content as KML feeds. Your History Here’s KML; PlaceOpedia’s KML (“although this currently doesn’t work.”)

(And finally — posting will be a sporadic over the entire next week, as I am off to Paris and then London, where I am about to become an uncle. As they say in Sweden, jag kommer att f√ï vuxenpo√ßng.)

Matthew Hampton writes in:

I am a GIS analyst/cartographer and am very interested in the translation of GIS data into GE. The forthcoming A2E script looks very promising, but presently it looks as though the “KML Home Companion” script is coming along as well. I don’t know if A2E is going to cost money but KHC (or KMLHC?) is open source. [Jim Cser] just released v2.0 and finally supports re-projections.

Thanks Matthew for the heads up. I see James Fee also has a post up on this. Unfortunately, given the complete absence of ESRI’s ArcGIS 9 on my desktop, this is the point at which the pros take over.

(Request: Any chance some of you could showcase some of your more fancy work in ArcGIS, exported using these tools? Just so we can get an appreciation of what GIS professionals do?)