Ogle Earth notes

A perfect storm has conspired against blogging here these past few days: Intercontinental travel (I’m back in Sweden for a week), rapids in the pace at work, and an unstable Mac — if you’re going to use the Mac’s FileVault hard disk encryption feature, whatever you do don’t crash the machine. I know that’s a challenge, but it’s one I’m quite capable of rising to. Looks like a complete reinstall lies ahead this weekend. Argh. Better to just use Yojimbo and Knox in the future — I’ve never had problems with those. (The silver lining to running an Intel Mac: My Windows partition still works!)

(Also: An apology to the makers of the Berlin network link team for wondering aloud snarkily why it still won’t work on the Mac. It’s my Mac it won’t work on. Other Macs have no problems.) I’ve just figured out what’s wrong: The server hosting the network link only recognizes Google Earth Free for Mac, not Google Earth Pro for Mac. I use the latter, but have both installed. Switching to the free version solved the problem. What’s happening here, I’m almost certain, is that the server only responds to specific UserAgent names, and Google Earth Pro isn’t on that list.

The past few days were news-filled, of course. The amount of news worth reporting is clearly inversely proportional to my ability to report it (Stefan’s law?:-). I should be catching up shortly.

GeoMapLookup get KML support

GeoMapLookup, a very slick web 2.0-ish geolocator for IP addresses, has now added a link to Google Earth for every result. A nice touch: having the link in the popup. A very nice touch: Each IP lookup gets its own permalink. Me, I’m blogging this from here right now (and here is the permalink for the KML).

swedenip.gif

One possible use of all this permalinking goodness: Tweaking the templates in your CMS to show where commenters are coming from: Here’s how to do it for WordPress. (Via Cinnamon thoughts)

Censorship of India in Google Earth? Still no decision

India’s The Economic Times revisits the ongoing saga regarding spots on Google Earth that the Indian government would like to see censored.

The short version: “We have not yet decided whether or not to blur some key sites,” according to Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s head of Global Public Policy (is that title a first for a company? How do you get that job?:-)

The longer version — says McLaughlin:

We take security concerns seriously but obscuring images will not help. We have never degraded image quality… The images available on Google Earth are also available for purchase from various satellite companies in market. The government needs to deal with this issue at the level of satellite companies because they are selling images to us… mapping services etc are available commercially… sometimes free of cost and sometimes for a price. If images damage security then they need to talk to satellite companies. Blurring needs to be done by satellite companies… targeting Google Earth will not fix the problem.

All true, but it does bear repeating that while technically “We have never degraded image quality” is not the same as replacing existing DigitalGlobe tiles wholesale with older versions (which is what was done in Iraq), the effect is certainly the same. Older is worse.

Finally, the article also reminds us of Indian President A P J Abdul Kalam’s call in April 2006 for “a new law to prevent foreign satellites from getting images of sensitive locations in India and make such attempts a cognizable offense,” despite the fact that country sovereignty does not extend into space, where these satellites are.

Links: Update for Vista; Panoramio hits 1 million photos

  • Via Virtual Earth asks why the 3D features of Virtual Earth have been slow on the uptake with developers, but has the answer handy:

    My personal opinion is the 3D has issues with being an ActiveX control that runs on Windows and IE only, it is not really web.

    In fact as a developer, if I know I am only targeting the Windows platform then a browser is not going to provide the richest user experience. I would be better off building a Windows application.

    It’s ironic (just a little) that Google, meanwhile, has a standalone application, though for three different platforms.

  • Overlays of antique maps of Russian cities, by Valery Hronusov.
  • There’s a new version of KMLer, the ArcGIS extension that lets you export and import KML, by Valery Hronusov.
  • Got Vista? There’s an updated version of Google Earth for you to download. (Via Google Earth Blog).
  • Panoramio now has 1 million georeferenced photos in its database. That was fast. There’s nothing quite like getting a default layer in Google Earth:-)

Analysing Google Earth client stats

Last week Frank Taylor linked to Barry Hunter’s Google Earth client version stats for the KML content that gets delivered from his server at nearby.co.uk.

Analysing the last week’s figures leads to some surprises — for example, take a look at the relative size of the different platforms: Linux has about 5% of all queries, Mac 19.5%, with Windows the rest. That is a much larger proportion of people using Mac and Linux versions of the client than what you find for generic web browsers on most web sites.

I can think of a couple of reasons why: There are more Macs at home, where people do their surfing, than at the office, where network administrators likely do not allow installations of Google Earth Free. Also, the average Mac tends to be newer and have a better graphics card, making Google Earth a more viable proposition. And Macs are popular in education, where Google Earth is a hit.

Looking at the figures for Google Earth Pro, just under 20% of all uses are with a Pro client. (Of course, this proportion is heavily dependent on the type of content available on a server.)

Finally, it looks like only about 4% of users are still using Google Earth version 3, though visitors to Nearby.co.uk are most likely to be savvy users, and such users tend to be aggressive updaters.

Conclusions? These, I think:

  1. There is no need to continue supporting version 3 of Google Earth. Almost everybody has version 4.
  2. If you make network links or API-based extensions that only work with the Windows version of Google Earth, do realize you are not reaching one in four Google Earth users.

Talking of PC-only contents, why is it that the Berlin network link still doesn’t work on a Mac after almost two weeks? Weren’t they going to fix that? [Update: Um, it seems to be working for some people on their Macs, though not others. Feedback is welcome.]

(Caveat: The above analysis is just an interpolation from one server’s results. If anyone else has such stats, I’d love to hear if they are similar.)

Now I’m blogging Second Life as well

It’s been a bit quiet the past couple of days here on Ogle Earth, for two good reasons.

  • The nightlife in Cairo is insanely great.
  • I’ve been prepping the launch of yet another blog, (building the) Second House of Sweden. Here I’ll be blogging the process of building Sweden’s virtual Embassy in Second Life, but also more abstractly on Second Life and metaverses. For example, in my first post, I look at the place tagging that has evolved for the web, the real world and now in virtual worlds. In some cases they describe related places in different domains; wouldn’t it be nice to link these tagging services?

Beyond Google and Evil

Slated for a session at the Association of American Geographers‘ 2007 Annual meeting in San Francisco this coming April 17-21:

Beyond Apollo and Adorno: Dionysus and Walter Benjamin on Google Earth

Any talk that manages to mention my philosophical hero Friedrich Nietzsche and Ogle Earth in the same abstract gets a mention on this blog. That’s a new rule. (I do apologize if the Dionysian title of this blog belies its Apollinian tilt — there are very few pointers to naked sunbathers here, alas.)

Now, if anybody manages to mention my other philosophical hero Baruch Spinoza and Ogle Earth in the same abstract, I don’t know what I’d do. (Thanks Brian Timoney!)

Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.