Cairo’s been a lot of fun these past two years, but now I’ve been asked by the Swedes to move to Shanghai to set up two new websites aimed at the 300+ million Chinese who have gotten online this past decade.

One site will be informational, a localized version of Sweden.se in Chinese. The other will integrate with the Swedish pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010, and here we hope to have some cool 3D web technologies on show.

Besides Shanghai’s famed food, the other reason I really want to go is the fact that this century’s longest total solar eclipse, on July 22, 2009, has Shanghai as its bull’s eye. I have yet to see a solar eclipse, so I am not about to let this one get away (weather permitting).

What are the implications for Ogle Earth? When I started this blog back in the summer of 2005, I had rather more time on my hands. That hasn’t been the case for a while now, but my new job will be full-time and then some. I mooted closing the blog, but the fact is that I really enjoy writing many of the posts. So here’s what I am going to try to do:

From now on, Ogle Earth will only focus on the geopolitical implications of all this neogeography — censorship attempts by governments, citizen activism, humanitarian and disaster relief, science outreach, and of course mainstream media failing to report all this accurately:-)

I will no longer be writing posts that link to other exciting neogeo developments on the web, nor write up newsworthy product announcements. Unlike in 2005, there are now plenty of blogs that do an admirable job of covering this space, not least by the likes of Google and Microsoft themselves. I can’t guarantee, however, that I won’t occasionally post about jaw-dropping new technologies or tools I come across.

I hope to be able to write one or two posts per week, but since the relevant bloggable events don’t follow a quota system, neither will I. Also, the next month will be really busy, so please bear with me.

Reuters India writes about India’s upcoming national satellite imagery mapping project Bhuvan: “India’s own Google Earth causes security worries”. It’s an article that was just waiting to write itself. While it is competent enough, the experts interviewed — not so much:

But there are security concerns that Bhuvan could be misused because usage would be free.

“Giving satellite images to everyone will obviously have some kind of a security impact,” said Ajai Sahni of New Delhi’s Institute for Conflict Management.

“There is a possibility of misuse of such technology,” Sahni said.

First, if there were to be a security impact, it would have happened when such imagery first became widely available for free, back in 2005 with the launch of Google Earth, and not now with Bhuvan. Barn door, horse, etc.

But a more important point is this: Before it became free the imagery was not secret, but merely expensive to purchase; it was accessible to those with the money and the motivation — such as, say, a terrorist organization, or a belligerent neighboring country.

The only new group of people Google Earth made high-resolution satellite imagery available to is the world’s citizens, the ones who should be encouraged everywhere to make sure their governments and militaries are accountable to them. Starting such a participatory democratic institution would have been impossible without free images. Now that they are free, all the motivation needed is for everyone to want to see their neighborhood from space, because this way everything strange will eventually get noticed and discussed on blogs and forums and then in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, another “expert” rehashes a very silly idea:

Security analyst Uday Bhaskar said there needs to be a global consensus on availability of such technology.

“There should be a global consensus on what is the kind of technology disseminated and what kind of firewall we need to erect for our own internal security,” Bhaskar said.

India’s government has in fact tried to get this idea implemented as new international law via the United Nations before, as blogged back in 2006. The main problem with Bhaskar’s notion of a “consensus” is that it would in fact be a consensus of many countries whose governments are paranoid and/or undemocratic. If they had their way, Google Earth would just be a fuzzy blur. The radical transparency that Google Earth has brought us is a feature, not a bug, and it does not require interference from dubious new laws. Fortunately, this is obvious to all except Bhaskar and a few other muddled minds.

[Update: I forgot: In other news today: The Hindu writes: “Maharashtra wants Google Earth censored”:

Mumbai (IANS): The Maharashtra government is examining legal options to censor Google Earth and curb it from showing sensitive locations to prevent terror attacks such as what happened in Mumbai, a minister said on Tuesday.

Yes, that was earlier today, sigh…]

• Astrotagging and Astrometry.net: Wow: Astrometry.net has built a web-based tool that takes your astronomical image and returns the coordinates of the image plus a list of astronomical objects in its field of view. The result: “We hope this will help organize, annotate and make searchable all the world’s astronomical information.” Sounds like a familiar goal:-)

  It must be quite a challenge to pull this off, but here’s an explanation of how it’s done. There is a working Astrometry.net bot trawling Flickr.com, where it volunteers “astro:” metadata tags to posted astronomical imagery, like this, with links on to the location in World Wide Telescope.

  Now Jim over at Eat your greens! has started to play with this metadata using Yahoo Query Language (YQL), which can access Flickr.com programmatically. One example of his work: Placing a Flickr image side by side in a web browser with the same view in Google Sky (web plugin).

  Here’s a primer on astrotagging, courtesy of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, with an aside for developers.

• LookUP: Astronomy Blog’s Stuart had a problem:
  

  I often find myself needing to get coordinates for various astronomical objects by name. There are several services out there to do this sort of thing already but all have different interfaces and cover specific types of astronomical objects.

  So he made LookUP, with a simple, Google-esque interface and generous through-linkage on the results page. For example, here’s what LookingUP the pinwheel galaxy gets you:

  

  I love how astrotagging makes it possible for LookUP to return images from Flickr, if there are any.

• Satellite imagery in games: While Microsoft Flight Simulator’s most recent incarnations used satellite imagery to add realism to the game, Ubisoft seems to have taken this practice to the next level for their H.A.W.X. jet fighter game, using GeoEye’s stereo satellite imagery archive. Nice video:

  (Via The Fiducial Mark)

• Panorama making-of: 360Cities’s Jeffrey and David Martin write a great how-to on getting panoramas online and/or into Google Earth.
• Imagery Update list: Google’s complete list of regions updated during the last imagery update. Microsoft Virtual Earth also had a massive update, but as its update list shows, Microsoft continues to focus almost exclusively on the first world. I continue to want imagery of the places I haven’t been to, can’t go to, or dream of. This is also the reason why Google Earth is a global brand — because even tourist guides in Yemen want to see their 4WD parked in front of their mud-brick compound.
• Bhuvan update: Livemin.com has new information on India’s upcoming satellite image-based mapping product, Bhuvan. In short: It won’t be ready in March 2009 as originally announced but will take a while to get launched, it “will comply with India’s remote sensing data policy, which does not allow online mapping services to show sensitive locations such as military and nuclear installations”, it will be browser-based, and it will not allow web users to annotate or add information. No word as to whether the view will be 3D, like the Google Earth browser plugin, or 2D, like Google Maps. (Via Spatial Sustain)

Priceless:

‘It’s easy and modern and I love it,’ [former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Mullah Abdul Salaam] Zaeef said while he pinched and pulled his fingers across the device’s touch screen to show off photos. ‘I’m using the Internet with it. Sometimes I use it for the GPS to find locations.’

The Sun headline tomorrow: “Exclusive: Taliban using iPhones for targeting”, followed by an article decrying the legality of GPS devices.

[Update 13:08 UTC: Upon closer examination, the mullah is clearly holding a 1st-generation iPhone, which has no GPS! So AP made up the quote or Zaeef is lying. Not that this will stop The Sun:-)]

[Update Thursday: The original story has no mention of GPS. It definitely seems added after the fact to the photo caption. (See comments)]

You’d think that the UK’s The Sun would have crawled under a rock from embarrassment after its cringeworthy article announcing the discovery of Atlantis two weeks back. Not so. It is back for more abuse, with an “exclusive” that reveals: Brit nuclear HQ on Google Earth

(But first, notice how the Atlantis story still gets prominent coverage as a related story. That’s because The Sun does not believe in corrections.)

So what’s the news, exactly? The most recent imagery update has finally added some high resolution tiles to Scotland, including of the UK’s main nuclear submarine base. Google Earth doesn’t tell us by default, but a quick perusal through the DigitalGlobe default layer shows that the imagery in question was taken on March 13, 2003 (compare the cloud pattern near the base).

That means that the imagery has been available to the public for purchase from the DigitalGlobe store for about 5 years now.

Fortunately there is a website, The Sun – Tabloid Lies, that documents the The Sun’s antics, and it contains a very good fisking of this article. That frees me to focus on the remaining errors.

For example, The Sun writes:

Two years ago the Government demanded Google blot out British bases in Iraq after a terrorist held in Basra was found with a Google Earth map of the Shatt Al-Arab base — home to 1,000 soldiers.

It also agreed to fuzz out the Trident base, the highly-sensitive GCHQ eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, Gloucs, and the SAS training camp.

But following updates to the Google Earth programme, the locations are visible again.

The first sentence isn’t technically correct: Older pre-war imagery replaced post-war imagery. The second sentence is pure fiction. Those areas merely happened to be in low resolution on Google Earth at the time. The Trident base at Faslane, for example, straddled the edge of a high resolution DigitalGlobe tile back in 2007:

Newspaper reporters then (and now) did not have the competence to realize that low-resolution imagery does not equal censorship. Google Earth was (and is) full of low-resolution 15-meter imagery. It’s the default. As for The Sun’s last sentence above, the “again” at the end of it is thus entirely incorrect.

What’s a pity is that at the time, nobody (this blog excepted) corrected the media’s inaccurate claims about Faslane, Cheltenham and Hereford being censored. As a result, it is now the received wisdom that they were, and it is parroted credulously as the truth by sites such as The Register.

(The Register parrots much else besides, such as The Sun’s claim the the UK military top brass are “said to be furious” at the update, probably a claim made by the exactly one “shaken” (not stirred) unnamed military “expert” The Sun managed to talk to.)

The next installment of wholly justified Sun-bashing on this blog will likely be very soon, when the paper feigns horror at the UK release of Street View. Stay tuned!

Banning the hard-earned freedoms of modern civilization is just about the worst possible way of preventing some people from abusing these freedoms for evil. And yet San Diego Assemblyman Joel Anderson is attempting to do just that, by introducing a bill that would make it illegal in California to post images of public buildings online. Writes the Mercury News:

His bill would restrict the images such Web sites could post online. Clear, detailed images of schools, hospitals, churches and all government buildings—what he calls soft terrorism targets—would not be allowed.

“All I’m trying to do is stop terrorists,” said Anderson, of El Cajon. “I don’t want California to be helping map out future targets for terrorists.”

[…] Anderson said he got the idea after reading news reports that terrorists had used online satellite images to plan the November bombings in Mumbai, India.

Of course, once these images are no longer available online, California will have to ban all those terrorists potential terrorists people from taking photos of these places from pavements, out of cars, from the terraces of tall buildings, and out of airplane windows, to make sure the law is effective. And certainly no posting of those images on blogs. Which would make California sound a lot like Egypt, or Russia, or China.

As for the rest of the article — here is the obligatory fact-checking:

Google and Microsoft voluntarily limit online images to some extent. The White House, the U.S. Capitol and military bases are found on Internet maps but cannot be viewed as clearly as the buildings on the streets that surround them.

That first sentence is correct (for example, Street View imagery is removed after requests by individuals on privacy grounds) but the Washington example is not a good one: Google uses slightly grainier imagery of the White House and Capitol because that is the best uncensored imagery available for licensing of those areas — there is no choice for Google to make. Nor does Google voluntarily degrade imagery of military bases (except for once, in post-invasion Iraq, where it replaced newer high-resolution imagery with older pre-war high-resolution imagery). Military bases of the US and other countries are visible in Google Earth in as high a resolution as Google can get its hands on. (Sometimes Google has to choose between available already-censored aerial imagery and uncensored satellite imagery, but the new archive feature in Google Earth 5 will likely make that choice unnecessary.)

Detailed Israeli street images were removed by Google Earth after the government there raised concerns that Hamas used online satellite photos to aim rockets.

That sentence was the first time I had heard such a claim. Israel and the Palestinian Territories have always had 2.5m-resolution imagery in Google Earth, and still do. Might some data have been added and subsequently removed?

A bit of Googling later, I had the likely answer, on the Official Google Maps API For Flash Google Group. A developer asks:

We used google maps in our flex [Flash] application, and up until a week ago or so (I did not check it daily) I could see detailed maps. I saw city streets, and street names even in Hebrew. […] Today when I enter in the same application “Israel”, I get a map with just major cities and roads. I saw in the Excel sheet that Israel is only covered for major cities and roads, except that up until a week ago this was not the case. Can you reverse your decision, or provide us with an explanation….

To this, a Google employee answers:

Unfortunately, there was a bug in our code that caused the high-resolution Israel data to be available in the Flash API. This thread discovered it [On December 15, 2008]. We’ve since fixed the bug so that Israel data is no longer exposed in the API. We do not have the license to provide this to users of the API at this time. Our apologies to the developers out there, like you, who were misled into believing the API had legal access to the full Israel data.

I have no idea where the Mercury News got the idea from that this data was removed at the behest of the Israeli government on terrorism grounds, but since the article neglects to source that claim, we may never know. It certainly makes no sense, because street map data is far less revealing than satellite imagery, and you can buy detailed street maps of Israel in any good map store on Earth. (There was an episode in October 2007 where Hamas boasted about using Google Earth, but it never resulted in data being removed.)

• FlickrExport 3: Connected Flow’s FlickrExport 3.0 for Aperture and iPhoto has finally come out of beta. It gets a mention here because among the improvements we get:
  

  – GPS track log integration – download your GPS tracks and connect them with photos as you upload them (supports GPX and NMEA).
  – Geolocation presets – store a location and recall it with one click.

  

  You can also set the location from the current view in Google Earth. All this is useful if you want to make a quick and dirty geotagged set on Flickr, but the georeferencing feature does not save the location to Aperture’s database (and I presume not to iPhoto either) so I won’t be using it, in favor of georeferencing solutions that change the metadata of the original image.

• Google Earth tours: Google Earth Design‘s Richard Treves takes you through the required steps for making a simple tour in Google Earth 5. Meanwhile, Google Earth Blog has a nice roundup of some well-made tours.
• China to launch own virtual Globe: China Economic Net reported earlier in February that China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping is going to build a domestic counterpart to Google Earth. According to the article, it will be censored, but carry more high resolution imagery of China than Google Earth. Just like India’s Bhuvan, then.
• Imagery Update: Google Earth Blog and Google Lat Long Blog alert us to the latest Google Earth imagery update.
• SketchUp for Google Ocean: An update to Google SketchUp 7 lets you place models underwater in Google Earth 5. Here’s how.