Convergence between Google Earth and Maps continues: Highest zoom levels in Google Maps for 38 US cities now sport 2.5D buildings, repurposed from Google Earth’s default 3D layer, like so:

It’s not Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye view, but those sides of buildings are looking quite clickable, don’t you think, should Google ever come out with street-level content?

Hundreds of media organizations carried news about the new Darfur layers in Google Earth — and that’s just in English. In Sweden alone, over 40 papers ran the news (an example). In the US, many local news organizations and papers ran the AP or Reuters story. Here’s a rundown of links to some of the larger and/or more interesting ones, with some observations at the end:

Using their own correspondents: The Los Angeles Times (business), BBC (front page feature), CNET (front page, and as a top headline for media 2.0), CNN (technology), Washington Times (business), PC World, ABC News (world news) and a good article/blog in Wired.

Reuters: Australia’s The Age (under technology), New Zealand Herald (world news), The Australian (world news) and Scientific American (science news).

AP: Seattle Post Intelligencer (business), MSNBC (technology), The Guardian (world news), Sydney Morning Herald (technology), the Houston Chronicle (markets), Seattle Times (world news), CBS News (technology), Baltimore Sun (world news), Washington Post (technology), San Jose Mercury News (breaking news), San Francisco Chronicle (business), Denver Post (world news), International Herald Tribune (Americas??) and the Sudan Tribune (which is a great resource for Darfur news, it turns out — pity they don’t have RSS).

AFP: Times of India (world news), iAfrica (technology) and Baku Today (technology).

IDG News service: IT World and InfoWorld.

What’s interesting is that there is no consensus among news editors as to where such a story belongs: Is the story’s most important news component the fact that there is a genocide being perpetrated in Darfur (world news), that new technologies are being employed to educate people about Darfur (technology), or that Google is involved (business)? In a sense, the situation in Darfur is not itself a “news” story, in that we all already (should) know what’s going on there. (If anything, the news is that it’s getting worse at the moment, and people I know who work there are doing so without much hope of a resolution anytime soon.) But putting the story in the technology section relegates it to a spot not followed by the people that the technology is most aiming to reach.

I think this is above all a story about how new technology is letting us all be witnesses to a genocide in progress, and how that raises our own responsibilities — so perhaps this is a story best also told in the glossy Sunday newspaper magazines, read when people have more time to play with Google Earth and where there is more room for long-form stories about larger technology trends coupled to humanitarian crises such as Darfur, but also Katrina/New Orleans and the Pakistan quake from 2005. How about it, New York Times?

The live webcast and press conference launching the Darfur layers in Google Earth is now on. Check it out here, on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s site.

Also up and running now is the museum’s home page associated with the Darfur layers, where you can download the expanded standalone version. You can find out more specific information about the provenance of each individual layer on this page; there is also a long list on that page of people who volunteered their time and expertise to make this layer a reality, including Declan Butler, Brian Timoney, Timothy Caro-Bruce, Mikel Maron, Andria Ruben-McCool, Megan Goddard, Lars Bromley, Jeremy Nelson, Brian Steidle, Ron Haviv, Mark Brecke, Ryan Spencer Reed, Mia Farrow and Brian Flood.

Missing from that list is USHMM’s own Michael Graham, who initiated the project and whose tireless perseverance pushed this project all the way to completion, through numerous iterations and prototypes.

[Update: Here is the press release.]

Besides the Darfur layers, several other new layers made it into Google Earth this morning.

• New Zealand is the first country whose tourism department has managed to get a prime spot in Google Earth, with placemarks of popular destinations that lead to the relevant websites. Now why didn’t Sweden think of that?:-)
• The Trimble Outdoors Trips layer adds GPS tracks and imagery from user-contributed hiking trips in the US. Nice feature: You can send a trip you like directly to your web-enabled phone. If your phone is GPS-enabled, you can send it the track data instead.
• There is a new layer called “Skiing” that shows ski resorts and ski lifts. Elsewhere, there is a new layer for “mountain railways”. All this comes together beautifully in — where else — Switzerland, where the Matterhorn is now surrounded by lots of new geospatial data:

Google Earth got a whole slew of new layers this morning, one of which stands out — literally. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s layers documenting the genocide in Darfur are turned on by default. It’s an overtly political statement on the part of Google, and one I wholeheartedly applaud.

USHMM has been working on bringing this content into Google Earth for a while now, and it is the kind of information that is best published to a geobrowser: Burned villages, photographs, refugee camps, testimonies… All these atrocities happened somewhere, but no longer is this place abstract. Google Earth’s high resolution backdrop makes it all immediate.

The default layers link to fuller documentation, with more graphic photographs and with precise refugee numbers, which you can also manually download here. Just go take a look. It’s compelling. You will soon find more information on USHMM’s site here, and if you want to get involved, go here.

Easter weekend reading of note:

• Mikel Maron looks at the possibilities involved with georeferencing Twitter messages, and how it’s being done in Twittervision, which maps the latest messages in real time. I can’t wait until my GPS-enabled phone automatically adds geotags to my twitters. (Main impediment to Twittering here in Cairo: Every sms goes to and comes from a UK number, which costs a non-trivial sum for cute but mostly trivial information. And that’s a pity, as Twitter couldn’t be more perfect as a developing-world publishing tool &mdash because everybody has a mobile phone. One challenge to overcome: It is relatively easy for more censorious governments to ban twitter, as all twitters come from and go to one number, which can be nabbed at the exchanges.)
• While in the UK, the debate is about whether tax-payer funded GIS data should be made free, in Santa Clara County, California, the debate is about whether the terrorists taxpayers should have access to the data at all. Because, you know, Santa Clara is really high on the terrorist target list, compared to all the other counties in the US.
• 3pointD flags the news that Microsoft is funding USD 1.1 million-worth of university research projects in sensor maps and mass GIS, and adds salient commentary.
• Sometimes maps make the most eloquent political statement. Gregor J, Rothfuss uses MyMaps to map the top farm subsidy recipients from the USDA in the US and from CAP in the UK. Shameful.
• Adobe’s AEC product manager blogs Adobe Photoshop Extended’s support for KMZ, and has a colleague explain more fully what this means.
• All Points Blog: Is IBM the Next Major GIS Player? Most of the comments recommend that IBM go the open source route instead of buying ESRI, but one person mentions sagely that ESRI has lots of paying customers. Why not do both — and force James Fee to use Linux:-) (Missed it originally, via AECNews)

Easter weekend KML content of note:

• A few weeks ago, The Map Room carried news of a new claim that the Portuguese in fact discovered Australia in 1522, a good quarter millenium before Thomas James Cook. Now somebody at Google Earth Hacks has taken the rather grainy image and overlaid it on Google Earth. It’s a pretty good match, it has to be said.
• Rotterdam is using the occasion of its annual marathon to turn a good chunk of its buildings into KMZ files, some of them textured, to provide context for the marathon route, which you now fly along in Google Earth. (Hat tip to Tom van de Wetering of www.dutchearth.com, “an upcoming Google Earth Consultancy Company”)
• Valery Hronusov does the obvious (with hindsight) with MyMaps, pointing a network link to the KML permalink for a Google MyMaps map and then having that refresh regularly, so that updates to the map are pushed automatically in all those who subscribe. Just be sure to send people the network link, then.

Words cannot express how jealous I am of Andrew Hudson-Smith’s acquisition of the Nokia N95 and his subsequent blogging of its ample GPS functions, including its ability to save tracks as KML using Nokia’s Sport Tracker applet. I left Sweden what must have been hours before the stores were flooded with this remarkable superphone, and here in Cairo I am alas relegated to drooling at Gizmodo’s photos.

One thing I cannot wait to do is to take photos with its 5 megapixel camera that are automatically georeferenced, uploading them directly to my Flickr account via GPRS or wi-fi, and then having that stream outputted automatically as GeoRSS or KML. Similar functionality is available with videos published to YouTube, though I think here we’ll need to come up with some hack for georeferencing those.

I suspect the N95 will revolutionize reporting in countries with draconian restrictions on the media. Here in Egypt, crackdowns on demonstrations are routinely accompanied by roundups of photographers, who are then obliged to hand over their digital cameras’ memory cards. Already, the Nokia N93 has been used by CNN reporters to take video in situations where a big video camera would have drawn unwelcome attention, but the N93 still looks like a small video camera. The N95 looks like an unassuming phone at all times, so you can shoot while pretending to phone, and then, critically, publish the photos to the web directly, before anyone demands your memory card.

The ubiquity of mobile phones makes it easier for reporters to meld into the crowd, especially now that everybody is always recording everything anyway. It’s a cliché to say that we’re all reporters now, but with the N95, broadcast quality video and print-quality photos can be delivered instantly to the world. In Egypt, YouTube videos of police brutality and the harassment of women have already led to high profile court cases, purely on the strength of popular outrage. If governments are going to want to reverse this trend, they are going to have to ban mobile phones, but unfortunately for them, that particular genie is well out of the bottle.