I’m in Washington DC for the rest of the week for one of my day jobs, as project manager of the Second House of Sweden: The librarians at the Library of Congress are curious about Sweden’s experience using virtual worlds for public diplomacy, and Sweden is happy to share it, so I’ll be speaking at a forum on federal information policies here for the Federal Library and Information Center Committee. If the below is a bit unfocused, I’m blaming the jetlag.

• Sense of place, Cairo edition: Friend and documentary filmmaker Oliver Wilkins made this stunning timelapse video of Cairo by night:

  
  Call to Cairo – D200 Timelapse from Oliver Wilkins on Vimeo.

  It really gives you a sense of the energy of this remarkable city. Moving here was a stroke of genius on my part:-)

• 03b: O3b is a project to bring satellite broadband to the “other 3 billion” in the tropics… and you and me. Thanks to O3b Networks, HSBC, Liberty Global and Google, I can soon move to anywhere in Africa and be a full-fledged net worker from there… if the lag is acceptable. A bright connected future awaits not just the poor, but also extreme telecommuters.
• Google Street View in ArcGIS Explorer! Here’s how.
• Top 25 Blogs in GIS: My two cents is that for a niche topic like geoblogs, we’d lose a lot of variety if we all aimed to blog in a manner that maximized our rankings in such a list; I know I’d quickly get bored writing for my blog. I like to rant about obscure topics that I’m passionate about, technorati be damned.
• Updated imagery removes photoshopping error: The latest announcement of updated imagery on Google Lat Long Blog also removes the photoshopping of Dutch imagery discovered a few weeks ago, with an explanation:
  

  It turned out to be an image-processing error that happened during our color-correction process, so we’ve removed it.

  Indeed, the spot in question now sports real trees. I think it’s interesting that the original post in Photoshop Disasters detailing the error got 120 comments; it should keep the image processing people at Google on their toes:-)

  The complete list of updates via Google Lat Long Blog is below the fold.

Continue reading Links: Cairo by night, O3b, Google imagery update →

Another person is wrong on the internet! Let me dispense with her arguments anon so we can finally get back to regularly scheduled blogging (as I will have my backlog nearly cleared)…

Internet maps will make us forget our culture: So warned Mary Spence, President of the British Cartographic Society, at a session on the Future of the Map at the annual conference in London of the Royal Geographical Society held on Aug 28. Google’s own Ed Parsons was on hand to offer a rebuttal. Said Spence:

Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history — not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography — at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day. We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique; giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.

The Map Room‘s Jonathan Crowe has already mustered all the salient arguments in defence of internet mapping, while Catholic Gauze and GIS Lounge add worthy points. I have a few of my own.

Spence argues that the answer is Open Street Map, a wonderful crowdsourcing effort to create a Creative Commons dataset of maps and points of interest (POIs), in effect duplicating Google’s efforts but without the proprietary ownership model for the resulting data. She likes them because OSM in the UK shows POIs by default, showing churches but also public parking garages, pubs, mailboxes, bus stops and bike paths. Here’s an OSM closeup of Cambridge:

But what if I’m not interested in pubs, or don’t have a car I need to park? And further down the line, who decides what is appropriate to add to a default layer — are pubs in Cairo an OK addition to OSM’s base layer? What about places of worship in the UK that are not in old church-like buildings? Isn’t it just more useful to separate the base map from the POIs and let users add layers for churches — or beer — if they are so inclined? Isn’t the presumption of monolithic culture something we’re trying to outgrow? (And hasn’t Google made it ridiculously easy, BTW, to turn on such layers in Google Earth, even including layers with photos of landmarks where the density of photo placemarks is excellent proxy for relative cultural importance?)

Second, Spence is convinced that UK Ordnance Survey maps would never make the mistake of omitting her beloved cathedrals from their default map. In that case, a solution to all her problems is at hand: Have the Ordnance Survey release its maps to the online public, just as Google and Microsoft and Yahoo have done. Better yet, have OS mine its geo-database and publish to the public domain standards-compliant KML for all UK cathedrals, all battles, all historical monuments — just as the Swedes have done — so that map users like Mary Spence will never again be forced to look at a context-free “corporate” map.

Oh, you mean Ordnance Survey doesn’t want to play?

Perhaps Spence could ask nicely?

Oh no, someone is wrong on the internet again! In this particular case, there’s been a slew of articles lately implying google is complying with government demands for censorship when that isn’t the case, so I need to set the record straight.

Cheney’s House:

This story seems to repeat once a year: This year Sharon Weinberger in Wired’s Danger Room blog got the ball rolling when she asked why imagery of the vice president’s house is blurred on Google Earth — or more precisely, asking why Google Earth is blurring the vice president’s house.

The blog eventually got a response from Google — that it sometimes uses imagery that is already blurred by the source, and that other mapping providers like Yahoo and Microsoft have similar imagery — but the headline of the post, “Why is Google Earth Hiding Dick Cheney’s House?” remains unchanged, implying agency where there is none.

I’ve asked people at Google familiar with the matter about this: If the specific imagery of Observatory Hill provided by the USGS and used by Google has been blurred due to of out-dated and out-of-place cold-war concerns, why not just get an unblurred version in the public domain via other channels, like Ask.com has done?

At the very least, it would prevent bloggers from bothering Google spokespeople every couple of months asking about Dick Cheney’s house. The answer is that Google is looking for replacement data, but getting the licensing rights to publish it to the web can be tricky and/or expensive. That’s a far cry from a conspiracy to censor.

51 things:

Also in July, ITSecurity came out with a list of “51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps” that got Dugg and saw widespread re-reporting; and here too, agency is implied where there is none:

Whether it’s due to government restrictions, personal-privacy lawsuits or mistakes, Google Maps has slapped a “Prohibited” sign on the following 51 places.

But of the 51 items posted, in only one case did Google actively roll back imagery for security reasons at a government’s behest — in Basra, Iraq in January 2007. (Street View imagery removed because it was mistakenly taken from private property is not interesting from a censorship perspective.)

In the cases of blurred bases in the Netherlands and blurred energy sites or research labs in the US: that’s because the aerial imagery used was censored by local authorities before being released to the public. Google could, if it wanted to, use satellite imagery from other sources that show these areas unblurred, but chose not to, either for cost reasons or because it figured that the quality of the higher resolution aerial imagery offset the downside of having some specific sites blurred. Again, no agency on the part of Google.

So why couldn’t Google offer multiple imagery datasets — say a base dataset with 15m imagery plus DigitalGlobe’s content, and a dataset for higher resolution aerial imagery that might be censored in places? I’m sure that it could if it had an unlimited budget and unlimited development resources — and in that case, there are many more other items on my wish list: a historical database of datasets, for example. It’s just that Google doesn’t have unlimited resources, and it isn’t obliged to spend those resources it has on actively circumventing pre-existing censorship.

In other cases, ITSecurity’s list is just plain wrong: I don’t know why this meme continues to persist, but Google has not censored any imagery in India (see item #24) — I had this confirmed to me again recently. Nor has Yona in Guam been censored (item #27). It’s easy to make a list like this if accuracy in reporting is not important. It certainly doesn’t help that there are a lot of inaccurate articles out there on the web being returned in search results and subsequently referenced. Still, it doesn’t reflect well on the credibility of ITSecurity, which is ostensibly a serious news site.

Raw Story:

The Raw Story’s John Byrne, in an article from Aug 26 entitled “Google Earth increasingly compliant with censorship requests: US intelligence report” uncritically re-reports ITSecurity’s “list” as factual but also rewrites a report by the US government’s Open Source Center from July 30, 2008. Surprise surprise, the report is rife with factual errors:

After the Basra incident, Google Earth seemingly became more open to dealing directly with foreign governments to assuage their security concerns. It agreed to blot out British bases in Iraq and other sensitive UK installations such as the eavesdropping base at Cheltenham and the Trident nuclear submarine pens in Faslane, Scotland.

No it did not. Nor is there any evidence of imagery being blurred at the Chinese government’s request, as the report insinuates. (Satellite imagery is not available to those inside the great Chinese firewall, but that isn’t the rest of the world’s problem.)

The Raw Story’s Byrne re-reports as fact further errors from ITSecurity’s “list”:

Among the areas Google blurs out in China includes, not surprisingly, Tibet/Xinjiang Province. Other areas of Asia that have been clouded include northern areas of Pakistan — it’s unknown why or who might have requested the omission.

That’s just a ridiculous statement. Does anyone even bother to fact check any more? Tibet, Xinjiang and Pakistan’s Northern Areas are riddled with high resolution imagery squares from DigitalGlobe. Where is the censorship? Are these people so clueless that they assume that areas without high resolution imagery are censored?

Is it a big deal that these stories are out there on the web? The main problem is that people read them uncritically, assume they are factually correct, and sometimes even re-report this fiction further as fact, as informationWeek and Strategy Page did. Eventually, it becomes the received wisdom that governments can get their way with Google, when the reality is very different. I abhor censorship of my mapping data as much as anyone (if not more) but I think it is very important to sift actual cases from urban myths, and in general the web is failing dismally at this task.

Hot on the heels of the Ipoki-Qik collaboration, which shows live, GPS-georeferenced mobile video side by side with an updating map, Windows Mobile developer Inca X has come out with Live Media for Mobile that achieves the same feat. Though Qik/Ipoki work with both Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile, Live Media (for Windows Mobile only) does let you embed the combined output in one easy step to any web site, as Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton shows (Silverlight permitting):

That’s a cool and useful feature; certainly something I’d want on my site next time I’m on a road-trip in an area smothered in cell phone towers and unlimited data plans. Sweden comes to mind:-) [Caveat: Doesn’t seem to work well with Safari on a Mac – Firefox is fine.]

• GeoEye-1 has launched successfully: Video of the launch. The satellite is capable of 41cm-per-pixel imagery, but US government licensing restrictions limit its commercial output to 50cm per pixel. Question: US laws can and do force US companies to restrict satellite imagery taken of the US, but where is the legal precedent for limiting resolution for imagery of the rest of the world? I thought there was only a specific law for Israel and Palestine? If you know, please let me know.
• Cowabungle, cont.: Commenters on the Steven Levitt’s popular Freakonomics blog also sound a skeptical tone when confronted with the idea of magnetic cows. A farmer and pilot argue that cow orientations are above all influenced by wind direction, and wind is definitely not something you can compensate for by viewing satellite imagery. I’m more convinced than ever that this story is bullsh*t.
• Geolocator: Drop an image with EXIF coordinate metadata onto this free Mac application and it will direct Google Earth to the location. Previously reviewed options: GPS Info CMM and Apple’s built-in support.
• Layer update report: Or, you’re reading Google Lat Long Blog, right? The United Nations Environment Program’s layer has been updated, Atlantic storms get trackers in the default layer, Georgia gets its missing data.
• Imagery update: Or, you’re reading Google Earth Blog, right? In the absence of an official announcement and listing, Frank’s collecting changed regions in the latest imagery update.
• Satellite tracker: Finally had a chance to check out Analytical Graphics Inc’s live tracker of all 12,000+ earth-orbiting objects in US Strategic Command database, updated every 30 seconds. WOW. Must see. Zoom out to find geosynchronous satellites, and marvel at the swarm nearer to Earth. For each satellite, you can also get fixed-frame tracks via the popup.

The past few weeks haven’t given me much opportunity to blog on Ogle Earth, but I did keep up the monitoring, so now that I am back in Cairo and settled in here’s a first attempt at getting some recent (and not so recent) news out the door, with commentary where useful:

• Monsoon changes map of India: Monsoon rains in Bihar, India, changed the course of the Kosi river during August, displacing millions of people from their homes, reports the BBC (with new imagery). UNOSAT has updated flood maps from the past few weeks. I’ve georeferenced the top one and turned it into a KMZ file to download.
• AGU Fall meet abstracts deadline looms: The 2008 Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union will be held on 15-19 December 2008. John E Bailey reminds us that the deadline for submissions of abstracts for the Virtual Globes session is September 10.
• Cities at night: Wonderful night photography from the International Space Station:

• Flickr loves KML, cont.: Flickr’s Dan Catt continues to show how the photo sharing site stays at the forefront of making its API geo-format-friendly. More on the code.Flickr blog: API Responses as Feeds. Combined with social location broker Fire Eagle, Yahoo continues to punch way above its weight in ways that would make Thatcher proud. Could it be the best thing that Yahoo has going right now?
• Trouble in the Kalahari: I stumbled across this closely packed placemark collection posted to Google Earth Commuity while ogling the lovely new Spot Image imagery in Botswana. Remarkable how areas that appear to be empty at first sight are teeming with interesting content.
• WorldWide Telescope downloads top 1 million: Microsoft WorldWide Telescope hits the 1 million download mark. That’s quite a lot of downloads for an atlas of the sky, which, lets face it, is a lot more of a niche product than a 3D atlas of Earth.
• Google geo-schema: Barry Hunter published a schematic overview of how all of Google’s geo properties relate to one another. It’s quite hilarious:

  

• Photoshopped Netherlands: Photoshop Disasters discovers a bit of the Netherlands that’s been photoshopped on Google Earth. Most likely the explanation is innocuous, but it’s remarkable nonetheless, because the Netherlands has a policy of clearly marking censorship on aerial imagery taking within its jurisdiction. Google is investigating, reports Stinky Journalism.
• RoofRay: Getting solar panels in northern Sweden might not be a good idea, financially. In Cairo, it’s another story. RoofRay.com calculates how much wattage you can wring from your roof’s surface area were you to slather it solar panels, simply by drawing the shape of your roof on top of Google Maps, and inputting the roof’s inclination. The web application takes into account your latitude, and presto, a cost estimate. Very clever (if your roof is in a high resolution area). (Via RiverWired)
• GPS2Aperture Lite out of beta: Geotagging application GPS2Aperture for Mac’s Aperture photo management software is out of beta. Writes the developer, Ian Wood: “It’s temporarily changed to only tag referenced files but that will be changing as part of the process of finishing off the pro version.” Ian’s also looking for beta testers of the pro version.
• Chrome Earth: Google releases its own browser, Chrome. Chrome is going to be Google’s way of making the operating system irrelevant when it comes to getting most everyday tasks done — a faster, more stable cloud computing terminal than current browsers. (Having tried cloud computing this summer, I’d say speed and responsiveness are crucial if cloud computing is going to replace desktop apps.) Chrome doesn’t support the Google Earth plugin just yet, but considering how Chrome is optimized for Javascript and Google Gears, I think it is only a matter of time before the functionality of the standalone Google Earth (such as the sidebar) gets replicated and begins rivalling the original. I’d love to be able to save and share my places; I suspect Chrome will make this feasible. (A Mac version is in the works.)
• GeoEye and Google in exclusivity deal: In a deal similar to the one made with DigitalGlobe two years ago, Google has the exclusive online rights to the imagery coming from the new GeoEye-1 satellite being launched September 6 7, tropical storm permitting.
• Wikiloc hits the big time: Wikiloc is a GPS community started by Jordi L Ramot back in 2006, and it was first blogged on Ogle Earth soon after it had won the Google Maps Mashup contents prize. Honorable mention in that contest went to a photo sharing site called Panoramio (and we now all know where it ended up) so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the announcement that Google has chosen to elevate Wikiloc as the repository for GPS tracks shown by default in Google Earth. Just as with Panoramio, expect the popularity of Wikiloc to explode — having your tracks appear on a Google Earth default layer should be an irresistible draw for GPS-enabled hikers. (Oh, and what is it about the Iberian peninsula that creates star geo-coders?)
• Photosynth launched: Microsoft’s Photosynth 3D photo matching software has gone live, as a standalone Windows application with a plugin for viewing in Windows browsers. A Mac version is in the works. O’Reilly Radar has a thorough post.
• All that’s round… Is not necessarily a meteorite crater. Try telling that to a man in New Jersey however, who’s convinced that round features in Australia constitute a crater from an impact half a billion years ago. Others are skeptical.
• Google Earth, mistrial enabler: A juror on a manslaughter trial in the UK decided to investigate the case further on his own initiative, using Google Earth among other tools. The judge hears about it and halts the trial.

In early 2006 a patriotic Palestinian uploaded a collection of placemarks to the Google Earth Community pinpointing old Arab villages that were abandoned or forcibly cleared in the upheavals that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948. The post generated much discussion and many downloads, which meant that the attached placemarks were soon visible in Google’s “Best of Google Earth Community” layer, generated automatically from an algorithm for interestingness and visible by default on Google Earth.

As a result of this promotion, patriotic Israelis discovered that one of the several hundred placemarks, which puts the alleged destroyed village of Arab Ghawarina on top of the modern Israeli town of Kiryat Yam, was in all likelihood misplaced. Not amused by having this erroneous placemark appear above Kiryat Yam, the town in question filed a legal complaint in February 2008. Media reports from the time indicated that the Palestinian author of the layer, Thameen Darby, was open to correcting the location of Arab Ghawarina, but for some reason this never happened, possibly because the entire thread was soon locked down by the forum’s moderators.

The result was a campaign by some patriotic Israeli groups to get the offending placemark removed from Google Earth. On June 2008 The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs accused Google of anti-Israel bias for not removing user-generated content from a default layer that the center felt was slanderous:

Generally, Google allows all kinds of organizations or individuals to create overlays with their own information on its map. These overlays are only available to those who specifically request them, but they are not automatically incorporated into the core map of Google Earth that every user entering its website can see. Disturbingly, Google has incorporated the Palestinians’ overlays and their accompanying narrative into its core maps of Israel. As Google maintains editorial control over its core layer, it has responsibility for its content, which it clearly has not adequately exercised.

The main problem with the above accusation of anti-Israel bias is that content for the “Best of Google Earth Community” layer was indeed “automatically incorporated”, based on an algorithm for interestingness without further human input by Google, and that there were in fact many, many other examples where user-generated content visible by default would favor the narrative of one group over another, and be promoted to default visibility simply based on the interest it created on the forum. An O’Reilly blog uncritically repeats the report’s accusations of bias as true.

In July 2008 the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) wrote a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt and in a press release “condemned” Google for knowingly permitting Google Earth to “become a vehicle for promoting false and demonizing political propaganda about Jews and Israel.” Part of the letter reads:

Google has permitted anti-Israel propaganda to be elevated on Google Earth so that it automatically appears when Google Earth users seek geographical information about Israel; other content contributed by outsiders has not been treated the same way. It is shameful to see that Google has chosen sides and is knowingly and deliberately promoting anti-Israel falsehoods.

Again, the record shows otherwise. All other content was treated the same way, and so the accusation that Google chose sides does not stand up to scrutiny.

What is true, however, is that many people assumed that being part of the “Best of Google Earth Community” layer somehow amounted to an endorsement by Google. This was not the case, though Google never made that case particularly clear. Such a lack of clarity amid a growing sense that Google Earth has become the de facto geographic gold standard allowed accusations of bias to gain currency.

Fast-forward to the present day. Log on to Google Earth as of a few weeks ago, and you will no longer find a “Best of Google Earth Community” layer. Zoom into Kiryat Yam and you will no longer find the offending placemark turned on by default. Instead, you need to go to Gallery > Google Earth Community and turn on that layer manually. Then, indeed, the placemark for Arab Ghawarina becomes visible again.

Patriotic Israelis are claiming credit for the change:

Google is no longer in the business of delegitimizing Israel because we made our voices heard. Such efforts need to continue, calling into question every bit of misinformation and outright falsehoods that are published about Israel.

Interestingly, a Jerusalem Post article from Aug 31 explicitly calls the new default “Places” layer a more robust replacement for the now-defunct default “Best of Google Earth Community” layer. Nobody at Google is quoted on the record in the article as this being the intention, though I suspect it may have been sold as such to the reporter off the record. The article also contains other information that I haven’t been able to find on the record elsewhere:

Key to the new layer are special algorithms that corroborate information received through one source with the other sources. According to a company statement, this will make “it easier for users to learn about a given place through photos, videos, and annotations contributed by users around the world.”

But it will also allow Google Earth to automatically corroborate any information received from users before displaying it on the default layer. Only information appearing in more than a single source will be displayed in this layer.

On Google Lat Long Blog, Google made no mention of such algorithms when announcing the layer a few weeks ago. I’m a bit sceptical as to their usefulness, if they exist — the Panoramio photo and Wikipedia components of the Places layer have community guidelines that discourage tendentious speech in any case, but YouTube and Google Earth Community components are more accepting of such speech. I’m not sure how a popular but tendentious georeferenced YouTube video is supposed to be filtered out by an algorithm. Time will tell if the Places layer is geobomb-able, though patriotic Israelis can at least be certain that Thameen Darby’s layer of disappeared Palestinian villages is not in any danger of popping up: the places he references no longer exist, and hence won’t be getting any Places placemarks.

Overall, I’m happy with the change. I love the Google Earth Community layer — it is my favorite because of its generous and raw overabundance of both objective and subjective information, no matter where I am on the globe or how much I’ve zoomed in. It’s best that Google makes clear it is user-generated. I see the new Places layer as user-friendly alternative to the full-blown sensory overload that can greet new users turning on all the layers.

I’m less happy with the accusations of anti-Israel bias in Google Earth, based on the default presence of the Arab Ghawarina placemark, when clearly these were unfounded. The worst that can be said about Google in this episode is that it didn’t clearly label user-generated content as such. It would be great if those groups who made the accusations would now retract them, but part of me suspects that they weren’t made in good faith on mistaken assumptions about the inner workings of Google Earth. I may be wrong.

Is this case now closed? Don’t count on it. There is a part in ZOA’s letter to Eric Schmidt that has the potential to cause many more sparks to fly:

The problem of Google Earth is immediately apparent when users “fly to” the satellite map of Israel and seek geographic information about the state. As one news report noted, users “will get much more than a geography lesson.” Google Earth users are immediately greeted with two rectangles prominently displayed on the map with the words, “Every Human Has Rights.” When users click on these rectangles, they are treated to political propaganda about the suffering of Palestinian Arabs allegedly as the result of the so-called Israeli “occupation.” Users will reasonably, but wrongly, conclude that because this information appears by default on the Google Earth map, it is accurate and reliable, when in fact, it is nothing more than politicized propaganda that conveys falsehoods to Google Earth users about Jews and Israel.

Those Every Human Has Rights placemarks are still there by default, as part of the Preview layer. One is about a grieving Israeli mother whose daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber, and the other is about a man teaching Palestinian children non-violent ways of dealing with their predicament; but both placemarks also implicitly criticize the character of the Israeli presence in the West Bank, a perspective shared by many who are not anti-Israel or anti-semitic, like myself.

What’s interesting is that this layer, produced under the aegis of The Elders and Realizing Rights, was made in collaboration with Google Outreach and its contents vetted by all three organizations. If patriotic Israelis want to pursue the matter of Google’s perceived anti-Israel bias further, this is likely to be the most promising direction for them. (Full disclosure — I was responsible for the layout and design of the popups of the Every Human Has Rights layer.)