• The happiest place on Earth: The happiest place on Earth is this island, according to the BBC.
• North Korea Intel: North Korea Economy Watch‘s meticulously researched KML layer pinpointing every conceivable feature in North Korea, including the gulags, nuclear sites, military sites and elite areas, has just been updated. What’s causing a bit of a tizzy is the discovery of an island that looks remarkably like Korea:

  

  Well, it’s not an exact miniature, but it looks completely natural, and I can appreciate that if you’ve been staring at maps of Korea all day while making this layer, these kinds of similarities will pop out at you:-) Find it in the “Other Stuff” folder of the KML file. (Via DPRK Studies, via ROK Drop)

• iPhone to get GPS? GigaOm has sources giving the GPS chipset contract for the next iPhone to Broadcom, which corroborates other circumstantial evidence of a GPS-enabled iPhone: Built-in photo geotagging, and VC funding for Pelago’s Whrrl, a location-based context service for the iPhone.
• Test ad for Google Sky: This Google ad was recently spotted on Ogle Earth:-)
  
• F-Secure: Finnish internet security firm F-Secure monitors the origins of worms, spam and malware using Google Earth.
• Where 2.0 Disaster tech video: O’Reilly Radar has the video of the Disaster Tech talk at Where 2.0 by Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron, and links through to pretty much all projects and organizations currently involved in pushing this envelope.
• Hasselblad’s Phocus: Hasselblad, makers of the drool-inducing GPS-capable 39 megapixel H3DII DSLR camera, has now gotten its own dedicated RAW image processing software. Phocus (Mac only at the moment, Windows version promised) looks superficially similar to Apple’s Aperture, and can produce KML for a photo with coordinate metadata to show it on Google Earth. (At these prices, shouldn’t it do more, such as create smart collections based on proximity searches?)

Below, some more early adopters of the Google Earth view in the Browser. No cases yet of interesting uses of the API, but any week now…

• Metropix: Metropix, the automated floor-plan-to-3D service, now also shows the results of its service via the Google Earth plugin embedded. For example.
• GIS Planning: GIS Planning Inc has added the embedded Google Earth view to a number of Google Maps sites it has developed, such as Nevada Site Search.
• Tagzania: The developers behind geobookmarking site Tagzania, currently hard at work on behind-the-scenes changes, nevertheless took the time to add the 3D embedded Google Earth view for maps of individual locations: Here’s a 2D example, and here is the 3D equivalent.

Healthy Planet, the geocharity where you can adopt a national park globally (much like you can adopt a highway in the US) has now gone into a live beta, writes Mark Mulligan of King’s College London:

The Healthy Planet guardian scheme is now online and ready for donors to adopt plots as we work on the next phase of development (projects, voting, feedback, one hectare plots, mapping and communities). A publicity drive will be carried out over the coming months building up towards a major launch at Christmas

The KML for choosing a plot in Google Earth is quite a piece of work, circumventing the lack of an API via the judicious use of network links with radio buttons and view-based refreshes, albeit at the cost of lengthy instructions. It strikes me that the Google Earth browser plugin’s API, due to be fully cross-platform by August, is just the ticket for giving this kind of project the user interface it deserves for broader adoption by non-neogeogeeks.

Want to see a 3D map that is OS independent today? Swedish search and mapping site hitta.se has just added an embedded 3D map of Stockholm to its web offering — one that only requires Java and works with Mac, Linux and Windows browsers. It is remarkably accurate and looks like this:

While Hitta.se has the working example, the 3DMaps EX software powering it is by Agency9, which in turn uses technology by C3 Technologies, a subsidiary of Saab, the Scandinavian military technology giant.

The technology is different to what Google and Microsoft are pursuing. Best to let the C3 site explain:

The technology is based on high-resolution aerial photography with carefully calibrated cameras. For every picture, the camera’s position and angle are calculated with extremely high precision, using a very advanced navigation system. This is what enables us to give each pixel its geographical position with decimetre accuracy. Then, using stereovision technology, we combine two sequential pictures to measure the area’s height profile.

The result is an aerial photograph with each pixel positioned in three dimensions. Over an entire city, thousands of such photos are combined into one coherent 3D model — through an automated process in our unique 3D-processor.

Thanks to all this, there is no one today who can take pictures with the same precision and speed as we can. One example is when we filmed all of Stockholm in October 2007 and created a realistic, yet zoomable and turnable, 3D model of the city in just 3 days.

Hitta.se’s FAQ is especially keen to explain how it is different from Google Earth. Translating and abridging severely now:

Google Earth’s 3D city models are built by traditional means. Because the used images are flat, Google Earth often misses out on displaying heights for buildings and trees. Hitta.se’s technology is completely automated. Any object larger than a VW bus is included in 3D in the final image. Google Earth has a limited numbers of buildings in each city. Hitta.se will show all the buildings in a city automatically.

Do go explore Stockholm for a while. My own take is that this technology is great for suburbs and wooded areas, where trees do make a difference. As for Hitta.se’s 3D buildings, they sometimes seem suffer from slightly misplaced textures, which gives them that Daliesque molten clock look. Still, this looks very scalable, though it is not clear how fast the Java engine is compared to Google’s just released browser plugin. I still prefer the details of Google’s and Microsoft’s “traditional” 3D models over 3C’s output, but I definitely prefer 3C’s output over a raw height mesh (DEM) model. (Via Dagens Nyheter)

• Cartographica interviews Avi Bar-Zeev: Georgia State University’s Jeremy Crampton writes:
  

  Just to let you know that an interview with Avi Bar-Zeev has been published in Cartographica. As you know, Avi was co-founder of Keyhole before it became Google Earth and has worked for Linden Labs and many other graphics visualizing companies. He runs the Reality Prime blog.

  The journal has kindly made the interview available for free (normally it’s subscriber only) and we are keen to let people know about this in the geospatial blogosphere. Here are the links to the issue and the interview (pdf).

  It looks like a long and involved interview, so I will save it for the weekend.

• Google Geo Developers Blog: Google Maps API Blog is dead. Long live Google Geo Developers Blog. (Via Google Maps Mania)
• Avi checks out the Google Earth plugin: Speaking of Avi — In a post on his blog, he sees some interesting possibilities for games.
• IMINT & Analysis gets KML files: Excellent news from an excellent site.
• WaterExplorer: General Electric now has a major corporate communications project up on their site: WaterExplorer, a series of KML layers highlighting the coming global water supply shortages and the GE technologies that can help mitigate them. It’s a very slick site, and so is the KML.
• Map spam: Search Engine Land interviews Carter Maslan, Google’s Director of Product Management for Local, about the growing occurrence of “map spam” in Google search results.

Because it is so easy to add 3D to existing map mashups, this list is going to grow very quickly, but for today it is still worth pointing out some of the early adopters I’ve become aware of, so that you can go test the plugin.

• Housing Maps: One of the early original mashups, Housing Maps, now has an Earth button (though it would be great if Mac users didn’t get to see it. This goes for many of the sites in this post.) (via Trufflehoney)
• walkhighlands.co.uk: In the comments, Paul Webster of walkhighlands.co.uk writes in with an interesting discovery:
  

  Even better news is that the Earth plugin/ API fully supports kml network links with regions, unlike the Google Maps API.

  This means you can run huge datasets using just kml, as the Earth plugin will load more kml files on the fly automatically if you have the regions set up to load when on screen and zoomed appropriately. We’re working on making our site navigable using the new plugin – see here.

• Google Earth Hacks: Mickey Mellen writes:
  

  A page is up for every file on Google Earth Hacks, but many still have issues. When viewing any of our files, there is a link that says “New! GE plug-in” in the “Get File” section. Here is an example of a functioning one.

  More info by Mickey here.

• GolfNation: Mickey Mellen writes:
  

  Here’s another one I’ve converted – GolfNation.

  It has Google Earth content for every course. Some items are simple placemarks and some are detailed layouts of each hole. All of them now offer the option to view details using the plug-in. Here is a sample page.

• Travelpod: Mashable points out that travel blogging site Travelpod has gone 3D.
• See Bournemouth: Mapperz sends us to See Bournemouth.
• The Glacier Express: Google Maps Mania sends us to The Glacier Express.

Web applications that delve deep into the plugin’s extended API will take a while longer… but when these show up, I’ll try to post them.

If you visit this blog via a web browser today (versus, say, a newsfeed reader) then youmay notice a difference in the upper right-hand corner of the page: If you’re visiting with a Windows machine, you’ll see that the map has gone 3D. If you don’t have the Google Earth plugin installed yet, you will be asked to install it.

What’s interesting, however, is that if you’re visiting with a non-Windows browser, then the map looks just like it always has. That’s because Cristian Streng, the developer behind the Mobile GMaps/GMap-Track sites that lets me update my position on my blog via my mobile phone, was able to use a sniffer in his Javascript code to check my operating system before deciding which kind of map to return.

That’s the way it should be from a usability point of view. Mac users like myself hate to be reminded of features they can’t install. We’ll wait patiently for a few months until the Mac version comes out, of course, but in the meantime we’d like to pretend it doesn’t exist:-).

If you’re a developer, please do the same if you’re going to start using the plugin on your site — let it degrade gracefully for Mac users. Please don’t inflict pop-up reminders on us for a Windows plugin we can’t install.

If you want to know how to add Cristian’s gracefully degrading 3D map to your site, here’s what he has to say:

In order to enable it on your website change the map change in the embedded code from mt=s to mt=e . That means you should replace the iframe line with something like this:

<iframe scrolling=”no” style=”border:0;padding:0;margin:10px;”

src=”http://www.gmap-track.com/user.php?user=ogleearth&output=embed

&zoom=13&mt=e&w=300&h=170″ width=”300″ height=”170″>

An account on GMap-Track is free, of course. My parents love it:-)

Just a few hours after the Google Earth browser plugin went live, enabling Javascript-savvy developers to host instances of 3D Google Maps on their websites (in Windows browsers), Virgil Zetterlind of EarthNC has gone and made it possible for us plebs to turn any KML/KMZ URL and Google MyMaps URL into an embeddable map for any website using the iframe tag — no developer API key required!

Instructions are here, and the actual tool itself is called the the TakItWithMe.com Google Earth Embedded Map Tool. Considering what it does, Virgil can call it anything he likes:-)

Here’s an example using a previously created Google Mymap (in a separate window, as it generates a plugin warning popup for Mac users).