Wow. Announced today at Google I/O, Google Maps gets a 3D plugin just like Microsoft Virtual Earth’s, letting you harness all the 3D goodness of Google Earth via one extra line of Maps API javascript code. The plugin comes with its own extended API that lets you programmatically perform many of the things people have wished for in a Google Earth API — except that the solution, in the end, is that the API is going to be browser-based.
The plugin is for Windows only, at the moment, though with Mac and Linux versions promised. Creating a cross-platform API for a standalone application like Google Earth is indeed a tall order — a cross platform Javascript API, not so much!:-) The possibilities are many — just imagine the games you could make, just for starters…
[Update 18:12 UTC: Dan Catt looks under the hood of the new Google Earth API and likes what he sees. Separately, the Mac version of the Google Earth plugin could arrive within two months, I’ve been told.]
Géoportail 3D coming to Mac: It’ll happen this coming June 2, says France’s MacGeneration, and it’s because the underlying technology provider, Skyline, is coming out with a Mac version of the 3D web browser plugin. So if Skyline as the technological ability to embed a 3D virtual Earth into a browser regardless of whether it’s Mac or PC, what’s Microsoft waiting on?
Windows 7 multitouch UI: Half-way through this preview video of Microsoft’s next operating system, watch Virtual Earth being manipulated via a multitouch interface. It’s a safe bet, then, that Apple will have multitouch tables on the market within 18 months, sort of like overgrown iPhones. Can’t wait to manipulate Google Earth (and Microsoft Virtual Earth?) with multiple fingers.
Social KML:Brightkite is a new entry in the increasingly crowded location-based social network niche, but they’ve just increased their chances by adding KML support. May the most innovative win (or whoever gets their KML into Google Earth as a default layer first:-)
Hills now even more alive: Christian Spanring confirms Austria’s just got upgraded in Google Maps to 25cm resolution imagery by Geoimage-Austria, with Google Earth to follow soon.
Kruger National Park KML:Kruger National Park gets its own KML layer, highlighting not just the touristy bit but some wonderful deep geospatial content as well, such as the results of aerial animal censuses (White Rhino below), rainfall, biomes, historical sizes of the park, and access routes. A really nice layer, produced by ecoAfrica, an ecotourism company specializing in Africa.
Heard of Carolina Bays? Neither had I until yesterday. What are they? “These shallow, oriented, depressions — some filled with water and many named as lakes, most in a vegetated wetland state — are unlike any other natural feature of the American landscape.”
Because they tend to point NW/SE, there is speculation that they are the result of a meteor impact. Once they’re pointed out in Google Earth imagery, you can’t fail to see them, so lucky for us that there is now a KML file pinpointing many hundreds of them. Adds George Howard, who’s set up the page dedicated to Carolina Bay research:
I have always been convinced that ignorance of the phenomena has led to its status as a “mystery.” In other words, if more people were aware of them, someone smarter and more curious than I am might finally explain it all! Perhaps you can help.
The premise: That even despots like Tunisia’s Ben Ali want check out their house in Google Earth:-) His palace is smothered in YouTube videos of testimonies by political prisoners (turn on the YouTube layer if it isn’t already).
Time to define “Google geobombing” or “Google Earth bombing”, then. How about “Adding user-generated content to Google Earth via a tool that has a default layer in the application (Youtube, Panoramio, Google Earth Community, 3D Warehouse, Wikipedia…), making a political point by pinning the content to a location linked to an adversary so that visitors to this location cannot help but notice the protest content.”
Even if the definition is a bit dry, there’s not doubt that Google geobombing is great cheap guerrilla PR.
Norbert M. Doerner, who is behind disk cataloguing tool CDFinder (reviewed here), has now come out with a free contextual menu module for Mac that lets you easily view the location on Google Earth and other mapping services of any photo containing coordinates in its EXIF metadata: GPS Info CMM.
Install it, and the rest really is self-evident. Just right click on a photo, and you’ll see this:
What is really cool is that the links to Flickr and Panoramio put you one click away from viewing tons of photos near the location of your own picture. It’s a small download, it’s free, and does one thing exceedingly well.
(Currently, the link to Google Maps results in a German map. I’m sure that will change, or else you can do it yourself by going to “user/Library/Contextual Menu Items/GPS-Info CMM.plugin”, right-clicking to show the package contents, navigating to “Contents/Resources/GPS.strings” and editing that file to replace “maps.google.de” with “maps.google.com”. (You can even add your own coordinate-driven maps.) Log out and in to see the changes.)
Google’s Public Policy Blog has a post up entitled Promoting free expression on the internet. It’s a somewhat self-congratulatory read, but I think from it we can glean a strategic response to a question that has bugged this blog on many occasions, usually in the context of pressure by (typically autocratic) governments on Google to censor imagery: What would Google do if the government of a country in which it has significant investments (say, India) threatens significant financial repercussions if Google fails to globally censor its data?
The answer, it turns out (and I think it is a good one) is to get the US government to link its trade policy to free expression. Not only would it act as a disincentive to censorious governments, it would also prevent the possibility of a scenario where Google is censured by, say China, only to have a more pliant competitor enjoy the spoils. The possibility of such a scenario creates a moral hazard risk among US competitors in China.
Here’s Google’s Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong articulating her message at a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law on May 20, 2008:
The good bits:
We believe it is vital for the US government do more to make internet censorship a central element of our bilateral and multilateral agendas.
We have become convinced a single company can only do so much to fight censorship regimes around the world, and to meet the challenges in this area we recommend increased prominence authority and fund be given to the State Department and the USTR.
We continue to urge governments to recognize that information restrictions on the internet have a trade dimension.
Her examples never touch on what I hope is currently still a hypothetical government demand for global censorship by Google. She mentions YouTube a lot, which gets its plug pulled regularly by insecure government with a chip on their shoulder, but these episodes have only ever resulted in Google censoring content locally.
I believe Nicole Wong is sincere when she says “Google’s commitment to freedom of expression is at the core of everything we do,” and I am glad that Google is urging more involvement by the US government. (I am ashamed that European governments far too often act as censors rather than defenders of free expression. Criminalizing holocaust denial makes a mockery of subsequent free expression defences of cartoons caricaturing Mohammed.)
Still, just as the western governments could do more, so could Google. Here’s my list of suggestions in the field of geospatial imagery:
More transparency: Censored imagery is most useless when you aren’t aware it is censored. I’d like to know if the specific imagery I am zooming into on Google Earth has been censored by government agencies before release to Google (as is the case with imagery of the Netherlands). Even better would be a layer that pinpoints all found instances of censorship. Googlers can’t be expected to find them all, but perhaps this is a job for Google Earth Community?
More proactive censorship circumvention: Google often has several possible vendors to choose from for a specific region. In the Netherlands, Google chose censored but high-resolution aerial imagery instead of uncensored but lower-resolution satellite imagery. But why choose? Why not use the lower resolution imagery as a base layer and then superimpose the censored high resolution imagery, though not until the censored bits have been made transparent? Or else why not offer both imagery datasets separately, perhaps as an advanced option?
More preëmptive policy statements: There is still no official policy statement that I am aware of that articulates Google’s stock response to government demands of imagery censorship. Google Maps in China has no satellite imagery at all and borders compliant with Chinese sensitivities. Is this an option going forward for other countries if they demand it? Is replacing newer imagery with older in a war zone at the request of allied forces, as was the case in Basra, a repeatable occurrence? If so, which militaries qualify? Are the remaining blurry bits around Washington an oversight, a legal requirement or a voluntary patriotic decision?
Help preserve the historical record: Google often updates its imagery, replacing older imagery with newer. But that old imagery, especially when juxtaposed with the new, can be a valuable tool in keeping tabs on past or present injustices. One notable case in India had dated Google Earth imagery make a liar of a government official. In Zimbabwe, comparing imagery of the same area over time showed up Mugabe’s efforts to erase a settlement. So why not preserve all older imagery, perhaps in a timeline-based system?
Finally, there is one more thing Google should urge the US government to do: End the idiotic ban on downloading Google Earth from places like Sudan, Cuba and North Korea.
Taking the global geo-mapping service Google-Earth head on, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans to launch its own satellite imaging system on its website within six months.
Of course, whoever wrote this press release doesn’t know that Google is not in the business of making its own imagery, but rather accumulates satellite and aerial imagery from all comers. But let’s not nitpick:
‘We are going to launch our own satellite images on the web within six months from now. Our images are quite good and even better than Google,’ ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair dislosed here Thursday.
He said certain locations with security risks have been prohibited by the law from being imaged.
[…] Nair said the Remote Sensing Satellites (RSS) provide imagery of the earth in a variety of spectral bands and with a resolution better than one metre.
This is good news for us, because you can never get enough high resolution imagery of the planet. Imagery of India itself will be censored, but with luck India will soon be offering competitive imagery for sale of other areas that are currently serviced by just a few US, French and Russian vendors. India’s iGovernment site adds:
“The space organisation is ready to offer its capacities on a commercial basis and ring in its cash registers, after meeting the domestic requirement that calls for four to five launches a year,” [Nair] said.
Wouldn’t it be great to finally get sub-meter resolution imagery of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Golan in Google Earth, courtesy of India? Those areas are currently not available at resolutions higher than 2.5m per pixel, in part due to outdated legislation that should be abolished.
It’s ironic, though, that this additional source of global satellite imagery is coming about as a result of wanting to offer a censored alternative to Google’s imagery dataset and borders for India.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
