[See the update below]

A strange report by AFX this morning, referencing a Times of India article that I can’t quite find online:

Google Earth to blur key India sites amid security concerns – report

NEW DELHI (AFX) – Google’s satellite image service will blur strategic Indian locations such as government buildings and military sites after security concerns were voiced by the country’s president, the Times of India reported, quoting unnamed officials.

Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) Earth will not only blur pictures of sites that the Indian government considers sensitive, but also distort building plans of key facilities, the report said.

It said that Google representatives met Indian officials from the science and technology ministry recently to discuss the issue.

Google Earth will accept the government’s list of strategic sites that need to be masked, the report said.

Times of India is notoriously inaccurate, jingoistic and prone to optimistic reporting, so I’m taking this report with a grain of salt until I get confirmation. Most likely, Indian government officials, emboldened by the news of Google reverting its dataset to pre-war imagery of Basra, have now submitted a list of items they would like censored on Google Earth, and Google have promised to consider them. But then again, Google has just acquiesced to a censorship request in Iraq, so why not in India? If some security concerns are legitimate, why not all of them? Who are we to decide? Trust the government in situations like this. Any government will do.

In case you’re wondering if the censored Basra imagery is available on the web today — yes it is, and via the Google Maps API. Just ask for the right dataset in your JavaScript, and the imagery from September 2004 is still served up.

(Written in a lovely cafe on a snowy Sunday in Helsinki.)

[Update 2007-02-05: Here is Google’s on-the-record response:

“We were pleased to have the dialogue, which was substantive and constructive but no agreements have been made,” a spokeswoman for Google India said Monday.

Seems like Times of India jumped the gun. Again.]

What do Sudan, Lebanon and Zimbabwe have in common? Over the past two years, they have all had their respective humanitarian crises documented via satellite imagery. For Darfur in Sudan, a large number of recent high resolution images are now part of Google Earth’s base layer, clearly showing refugee camps. For Lebanon and Zimbabwe, some individual images have been released, but turning them into KML overlays was left to the amateurs.

Until Now. Lars Bromley at the American Association for the Advancement of Science has just posted a much more complete set of annotated overlays for Lebanon and Zimbabwe, and also a timeline-enabled set of placemarks documenting attacks on civilians in Darfur during September-December 2006. The imagery of Zimbabwe and Lebanon is regions-enabled, properly aligned, and with impeccable sourcing. Lars says we should expect to see more of where this comes from.

I think it’s great to see the fruits of scientific progress find such immediate, humanitarian uses. While it may not have been the case in the past, future leaders must now know that the humanitarian toll of their actions will be visible to all, archived, and pored over in minute detail when its time to write their histories.

Google’s just release an update to Google Earth — it’s a maintenance release, and these are some specific bugs they’ve now fixed:

• Occasional layer crash (when selecting “show core”)
• Non-admin users can’t fetch network links of kmz files (kml works) – Rumsey and 3d buildings fail
• Default to DX on Vista on first run due to poor OGL support
• Index buffers aren’t endian safe – problem with buildings on PPC Mac
• Crash in OGL visual context on cards that don’t support ARB_imaging
• Toolbar Update for Vista – current toolbar won’t autoupdate on Vista

Once you download the latest version, your build numbers should be 4.0.2737 on the PC, 4.0.2736 on the Mac, and 4.0.2735. Source: The Google Earth team. Thanks!

Regular service on this blog will resume as soon as the media hype about Sweden building a virtual embassy in Second Life dies down and my waking hours return to some semblance of normality — I mean, it’s cool and all, but not that big a deal, is it? Not as big a deal as the ongoing genocide in Sudan, surely?

I hope everyone is still as enthusiastic when the embassy actually opens, sometime in April. You’re all invited:-)

Now that Ich have bin a Berliner for a weekend, perhaps it would be nice to update this blog again:

• Dutch Mapping site Nederkaart points to a great global weather resource — www.weer.nl provides a network link that returns all the local weather forecasts for your view in Google Earth — even on Antarctica! Yes, it’s in Dutch, but the forecasts themselves use just symbols and numbers. This’d make a great default layer for Google Earth with just the tiniest bit of translation.
• Absolutely Fantastic: One network link that links to all the layers deemed “best of Google Earth Community” by Topographic Map archive, sorted by forum. Think of it as blogroll or OPML file but for great KML content.
• Interesting tidbit on Google’s plans for its Zurich office, from NZZ Online:
  

  Google, the world’s leading website search engine, will radically expand its existing business in Zurich by moving to larger premises at the Hürlimann industrial complex in the city.

  The company is secretive about the exact number of workers it employs in Zurich. Most estimates put the current figure at 200 and the new premises provide enough space for a total of 1,600. […]

  Google has recruited Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) spinoff technology firm Cybercity to help develop its popular interactive map service Google Earth. Cybercity is utilising its skills to put detailed facades on blank buildings on the internet program.

  We know Cybercity is doing Hamburg, but this suggests more cities are on the way. And that’s a lot of room for growth Google is getting itself there!

• Censorship fallout, cont.: A Slashdotter finds his/her university’s nuclear research reactor blurred out. The imagery comes from MassGIS, and it is highly likely they did the censoring, not Google. But how are we supposed to tell with confidence?
• Elevation graphing: Now available in NASA World Wind, and also in Virtual Earth 3D…
• NASA World Wind gets preliminary support for the 3D Connexion Space Navigator. Great news — that was fast. As my Space Navigator is currently a thousand kilometers north of me, I can’t test it just this minute, however.
• Thanks to Dan Karran, the newly released Drupal 5 (an open source content management system) gets both KML support and GeoRSS support. (Via GeoRSS Blog)
• Looks like Rev Dan Catt, previously responsible for a great third-party Flickr? Google Maps visualization with KML network link before being snapped up by Yahoo, is toying with Google Earth again — this time to play with heatmaps of Flickr photo concentrations, which he promises will be available as a KML download soon. (If you’re wondering how he got those screenshots, check out this pic in his Flickr photos, plus more heatmaps.) (Don’t forget, Beau Gunderson also has a heatmap of Flickr Photos for Google Earth.)
• Is Google’s contest to design the best SketchUp model of a US or Canadian university campus for Google Earth a clever and original incentive to get more content in Google Earth, or a way to assign rote assignments on the cheap? Both? It’s definitely a clever way monetize access to the Googleplex:-)
• The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the quirkier things people did to get noticed by Google’s aerial imagery plane on Australia Day, January 26. I hope for Aaron Schwebel’s sake that Google took the pictures.
• LookLocal is a very nifty mapping tool, with a “magnifying glass”-type tool and the ability to add your own KML placemark collection (under Explore Vacation Spots). (Via Mapperz)
• The Natural Resources Defense Council has a new site out — BioGems, “Saving Endangered Wild Places”. Some of these places are outlined via KML on this page.
• All Points Blog asks Michael Jones about what it takes to making “true spatual queries” in Google Earth. Short answer: The capability is there, what’s often missing is data exposed in a semantically meaningful fashion.
• Not noticed before: FSX KML. It’s a freeware scenery design tool for Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX). “It converts KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files generated by Google Earth into FSX scenery.”

In case you missed the addendum to the post about the rumor about Google Earth turning into Second Life, it ain’t happening.

What’s interesting, however, is that at Davos this week Bill Gates reiterated his view from 15 months ago that virtual shopping will be Virtual Earth 3D’s killer app.

Also interesting is that Second Life was very much the darling of Davos, fawned over by business leaders, digerati and journalists alike. In a space of about a week, a burgeoning meme that was all set for prime time has exploded in reach.

But most of Second Life’s fame still rests on its potential. This makes for backlashes, and the criticisms are fair — yes, much of Second Life is concerned with pörn and gambling; yes, there are fewer users than you might think; yes, it can be empty and sterile; no, we don’t know what protocol the coming metaverse will settle on. But what I am convinced of is that a metaverse is coming, and it is best to start getting the expertise for it sooner rather than later.

That’s the rationale behind the Swedish Institute getting into Second Life now. If there was anything holding us back in our decision, it was not the fear that Second Life was over-hyped, but rather that we’d be seen as falling victim to the hype. In fact, we’re in it to experiment, make our mistakes, and have Second Life residents act as our focus groups. A couple of years from now, every time the Swedish Institute embarks on a new nation branding campaign, our toolbox will contain print, web, audio, video, traveling exhibits and, yes, the metaverse. It’s the next “next” communications platform, with its own advantages and quirks, and we want to find out what works.

And what will work? My guess is that as more conventional content enters the metaverse, more conventional users will follow. The challenge is to find out how to make such content compelling, using the specific advantages that 3D virtual worlds bring. It will take a while before we stop using old communications paradigms in this new medium, just as it was when the world wide web was new — we had to learn to stop publishing virtual issues of paper magazines to the web and move to more native systems: Continuous publishing and blogs. What are the metaverse’s native communications tools? Perhaps it will be role-playing, perhaps crowd participation, perhaps learning by example, and probably something completely different. I can’t wait to find out what it is.

How does that rumor go precisely, you know, the one that people just haven’t been able to stop blogging about for the past 48 hours?

Heard an interesting rumor today from an academic who heard through the PhD grapevine…Google is working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world a la SecondLife.

Argh. I read that and thought, that’s how rumors are born — start with a misplaced analogy taken literally, add a dash of academic credibility, then feed it through a blogger’s bullhorn: off to the horizon it races.

But GigaOM has just now added another angle:

Our sources in China say that Google has teamed up with a Chinese company to develop the “virtual people” or avatars, while an internal team develops the virtual world internally.

And another potential piece in the puzzle: the WSJ reporting last week that Google is in talks to acquire AdScape Media, an in-world advertiser.

So that’s all the info to go on. And now I can’t help but blog it. What to make of this?

Although the technology is similar, there is a fundamental difference between virtual worlds like Second Life and Mirror Worlds like Google Earth. SL is limited only by the human imagination; GE attempts to reconstruct the real world as accurately as possible. I don’t think this basic classification will change. I could definitely see more social tools come to Google Earth, and I could also see Google wanting to create a MySpace killer by offering personal customizable 3D spaces which our avatars can frolic in; but such a system of linked personal 3D worlds would be a separate, new product — at least that is my own rampant speculation on what might make sense, based on no insider knowledge whatsoever.

If Google Earth is in for a social overhaul, what might that involve? I think Microsoft’s Bill Gates has already been quite forthcoming with the plans for Virtual Earth, and I think we should expect Google’s aims to be similar: It’s all about virtual shopping. In SL you shop for virtual clothes; in GE, presumably, you will one day be able to navigate the neighborhood you know so well to the store you have in mind, and then either visit its website to order merchandise, or else navigate a chain’s proper 3D store (if the investment has been made), much as you do now in SL, with the crucial difference that the goods you buy are actually delivered to your doorstep. (However: A store on IBM’s SL island is already experimenting with deliveries from Second Life to your doorstep.)

This might not be as efficient as doing a search for a book title on Amazon.com, but it might be more fun if you get to do it with an friend’s avatar, and discuss your imminent purchase.

Another way of putting this is that avatars might be useful as a signal of what you’re paying attention to. Avatars are really just points of view made flesh, and that point of view might be something you want to share with friends. Perhaps you’ll be able to invite a friend to “follow along” as you shop, so that you dictate the general location but not the specific point of view. Or perhaps, as you gather around a particular book on display, you will meet strangers who have the same interest as you at that moment — as good a place as a real bookstore to try your pickup lines.

In another context, we might have a teacher taking a classroom of students at connected Google Earths on a geography trip. The teacher controls the location of the view, but in that local space, students can roam about and do their own exploring.

Or perhaps that’s completely wrong. Perhaps the way forward for avatars in Google Earth is as signals of where you actually are on the globe (or at least your GPS-enabled mobile phone/gadget). Several third party services give us this capability right now, but there is nothing quite like making that a built-in feature in Google Earth for it to acquire ubiquity. Then you can really get all social-like — though this is perhaps most useful on mobile-friendly Google Maps, where a fancy avatar is a waste of space. Something like this already exists — Dodgeball. Google would just have to snap that up. Oh wait, they already did.

[Now go read what Avi has to say about all this. He actually knows what he’s talking about — though I don’t think a fictional layer for Google Earth is a likely scenario. For Google Mars though, yes, now that would be fun. Sign me up for a Fallingwater on the edge of Valles Marineris!]

[Update 17:08 UTC: I think Google Earth CTO Michael Jones’s comment below pretty much lays the Google Earth => Second Life rumor to rest.]

[Update 17:18 UTC: Looks like John Battelle gets it right too.]