A few days ago I posted a link to a dozen high resolution historical maps that the Stockholm City Archives have published as KMZ files. These proved quite popular, so the good news is that there is plenty more where that came from.

Anna Bergman, who digitized and positioned the maps, wrote in an email that they have big plans — “you have no idea how many maps the archives have,” she teased in Swedish. I asked for more info, so I got this statement back, vetted for publication:

The Stockholm City Archives is currently working on a large scanning project called Open the Archives, which will be presented in part using Google Earth. We are planning to publish maps and drawings of historical buildings. Other kinds of digital material (scanned documents and database records) that we possess will also be presented through the use of GE. We intend to publish the material on our website free for all to use.

Anna attached two images to show the kinds of documents the archives have. The first one shows Mosebacke, a Stockholm landmark, circa 1852:

Click for high resolution

The next one is of a house and dates from 1733:

Click for high resolution

That’s the same year as this map (28MB, though I love it when I get to download stuff at “2400 KB/s” — I’m definitely getting my money’s worth as a tax payer around here:-)

These documents will be georeferenced, so you can zoom in on a historical map in Google Earth and get links to drawings and outlines for historical buildings there.

So where am I going with this? These drawings and architectural plans would actually be an amazing resource for a virtual reconstruction of historic Stockholm, built with SketchUp. The drawings could provide both shape and texture to 3D buildings, while the maps pinpoint location. You could then fly around an accurate 3D rendition of Stockholm as it was documented hundreds of years ago!

And if the conversion tools mature, as I have no doubt they will, you could soon port all this work into Second Life, and then walk around in it, wearing nothing but 18th century fashions.

That’s too cool for it not to happen somehow…

[Update 0:24 UTC: Forgot to mention that Swedes are very good at this kind of geospatial enhancement of historical databases. Be sure to also read this story from a few months ago about the geospatial database of Swedish historical monuments.]

Two weeks ago, the WSJ pre-announced Sync, Microsoft’s dashboard OS that will make it into new Ford models later in 2007. The article mentioned a navigation system, so I had some fun speculating whether that meant we might soon find Virtual Earth in Ford dashboards, much like Google Earth likely will soon be in VW dashboards.

I lost focus on CES announcements this week, distracted by another gadget at MacWorld, but now I’ve had a chance to plug back into Sync. I had to scan many an article to find any reference at all to GPS navigation in relation to Sync; the only reference I eventually found is to how Sync doesn’t have it. Extreme Tech’s article:

Sync is essentially the Microsoft Blue & Me product announced a year ago with Fiat and much matured. Fiat had a one-year global exclusive; now Ford has a year’s exclusive in the U.S. market.

Sync is more robust, Microsoft says, particularly the near-universal support for virtually all phones and music players. But it’s missing the GPS navigation feature. With Blue & Me cars, the user can request navigation instructions using the cellphone. A remote computer parses the request, confirms it’s the address or business you want, then downloads navigation instructions and rudimentary maps, navigating via arrows. The route instructions are spoken through the car speakers; the map information appears on the radio faceplate. Those features, including the navigation capability, cost about the Euro equivalent of $300, thus our belief Sync needs to be in the $250-or-under range.

All Sync’s demo site shows is that Sync will let you voice control your phone, Zune or iPod — in your best French if you wish. Yeah, that’s much more pressing than GPS-based dashboard navigation. Tom Tom and Garmin need not worry about Microsoft.

Of course, I was also disappointed to find no GPS in the iPhone — probably because battery life already isn’t all that hot without it. So for now, my next phone remains the Nokia N95, which will be the nec plus ultra for georeferenced photo and video blogging, something which I plan to do a lot more of when I move to Cairo in March for a few months.

Why-oh-why is there never a “medium news day”? Many of the following entries deserve a post all by themselves, but unfortunately it is now or never:

• You couldn’t make this up: São Paolo police fight crime with Google Earth, catching the notorious criminal known as “Matador” by triangulating his cell phone signals to his hiding place. (Via Blog do Prof. Palazzo)
• Ever heard of the Skip Zone? I hadn’t but that’s because I’m not a ham radio operator. Skip zones are a real nuisance, it turns out. The Squid Zone explains why using Google Earth. Great use of Google Earth for science education.
• Stockholm’s city archives have made available a dozen historical maps of the city, from 1625 to 1922, as KMZ overlays. Be careful, some of the maps are gigantic, clocking in at 50+MB per download, but amazingly, Google Earth is not showing any laggy behaviour as a result.
• Press release:
  

  Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will begin to update the Virtual Earth online mapping platform with new, more detailed U.S. imagery under an agreement with GlobeXplorer LLC

  Wait a minute, isn’t that the same company that was bought by DigitalGlobe only yesterday? And didn’t DigitalGlobe strike an exclusive licensing deal for its imagery on the internet with Google just six months ago? That’s pretty clever of DigitalGlobe to end up serving maps to MSFT after striking such an “exclusive” deal:-) (Via James Fee GIS Blog)

• Landcraft is a gorgeous timewaster (Via The Earth is Square)
• Tim Beerman’s Shape2Earth is now live. Shape2Earth’s is a plugin for the open source MapWindow GIS viewer, so you don’t need to buy anything else to convert Shapefiles to KML. Shape2Earth costs $30, and there is a free evaluation mode, so you can test this without risk. For more info, check out the user’s manual.
• The Sandio/Visiontek XG6 3D mouse, previously blogged here, is being shown at CES, and now has a price: $80. It is billed as gamer’s mouse that is also compatible with Google Earth.
• John Hanke’s post on the official Google Blog announcing Google Earth 4, SketchUp 6, and the revamped 3D Warehouse.
• France’s Guilhem Vellut, also known as Pochi Superstar, has been building GeoRuby (RubyForge page) which is (as far as I understand it) a library of geospatial database commands for SQL using the Ruby programming language. The latest version, 1.1.1, now supports output as GeoRSS and KML.
• The schema file description (XSD) of ArcGIS Explorer’s native XML file format, NMF. (Via Pochi Superstar’s Del.icio.us links)
• Google Maps API Blog, that’s a very good point: Expose the geospatial database that propels your mapping site as a KML file, add that file to Google Sitemap, and sit back as as people find the site via Google Searches for locations. And if you’ve done all that work, why not just add KML network links as a feature for the end user… (Via Mikel Maron’s del.icio.us links)

A member of the Google Earth team writes in:

Here are a few database details you’ve not yet noticed…

• US Congress information has been updated to reflect the 110th Congress (Senators and Representatives) who took office on January 4th.
• Updated content from the GeoWeb layer data sources (example, more than double the number of Panoramio photos)
• Updates to other data layers (Volcanoes, ESA images, Tracks4Africa, etc.)
• Updates to GEC [Google Earth Community] content to capture latest posts there.
• …and as always, lots of subtle changes to refine both client at data.

it’s always good to have somebody looking over my shoulder…:-)

[Update 2009-10-27: Google Earth for iPhone is here! Read the story]

Steve Jobs has just been demoing the iPhone for the past hour and there is a puddle of drool forming on the floor here. I’ve been following live Engadget’s coverage and that of MacRumors. Jobs has just shown Google Maps as an application for the iPhone on what looks to be an incredibly sharp screen. Here’s a photo from Engadget’s coverage:

The only question on my mind right now (other than How am I going to be the first in Sweden to get my grubby paws on an iPhone) is this: The iPhone runs OS X. Will it run Google Earth? Perhaps with a little tweaking?

[Update 19:42 UTC: Check out the very impressive Maps on iPhone demo here.]

It’s official: The most recently released version of Google Earth, 4.0.2722, has been declared non-beta. If you haven’t dowloaded a new version of Google Earth in the last 48 hours, download it here, for Linux, Mac and PC.

The Google Earth website sports a snazzy new look (okay, by Google standards) that highlights the new default layer for 3D textured buildings. One new useful (to me) page: A product comparison between the Free, Plus and Pro versions.

Lastly, the EULA hasn’t changed, much as I wish it would: You still can’t use Google Earth Free or Plus “in any commercial or business environment or for any commercial or business purposes for yourself or any third parties.” I know it’s legalese, but if a secretary can’t use Google Earth from work to book his boss’s hotel rooms instead of using Internet Explorer, which includes Virtual Earth 3D (and which has no such legal restriction), then that is a tangible handicap working against the adoption of Google Earth as a geobrowser replacement for the ordinary browser.

• Early experiences with SketchUp Pro 6 are being shared in this thread in the SketchUp Pro forum.
• Over at AECNews.com, Randall S. Newton has a detailed article about SketchUp 6, including an interview with Google SketchUp Product Manager John Bacus. Interesting tidbit I didn’t know: SketchUp Pro 6 is a free upgrade for SketchUp Pro 5 users. Randall also mentions that Google Earth 4 is out of beta, though at the moment the Google Earth site hasn’t been updated to reflect this.
• Online SketchUp 6 manual for Mac and Windows.