Ah, now here is something to be truly thankful for: An update to Google Earth’s dataset. And not just to the imagery — to the height mesh as well. Check out the Matterhorn in Google Earth now:

And the Darfur region gets comprehensive high resolution coverage, which will make the work of humanitarian agencies easier while at the same time make it harder to deny the carnage going on there:

PenguinOpus posted the complete list of improvements to the Google Earth Community BBS here:

This morning, a terrain update occurred that corrects many of the holes in the SRTM data. This greatly improves the appearance of Mt. Everest, Matterhorn, and others in South America, Asia, and Europe.

Also included are imagery updates:

• 12 high-resolution cities in Germany (Bayreuth, Bochum, Castrop-Rauxel, Fulda, Hof, Mannheim, Marburg, Potsdam, Schweinfurt, Siegen, Unna Froendenberg, Wuerzburg)
• 6 high-resolution regions in the UK (Bridgend, Cleveland, Dundee, Plymouth, Poole, Rochford)
• 31 city updates from Digital Globe
• entire island of Oahu
• Imagery from individual cities/counties: Grants Pass, OR; City of Kent, WA; Salem, OR; Douglas County, WA; Hartford County, MD; Jackson County, OR; Summit County, OR;
• Expanded/updated coverage for the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Indiana, and Florida
• Darfur
• 66 Islands
• improved SF/Bay area water

• Slashgeo points to Slashdot, which discusses the announcement on KnowProSE that NASA will be building a “science-based synthetic world” starting in 2007, using the Unreal 3 game engine. Choice bits:
  

  The prototype is expected to be an introduction to NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration…”

  “We are combining the efforts of a commercial game developer, two universities and two NASA mission directorates into the project. If we can’t check off all three boxes at the end, then we’ll have done a poor job.”

  That’s another thing that sets apart geobrowsers from virtual reality: Physics engines!

• A new template for the Blojsom CMS, by Adam Burt. This one takes the coordinate data for your blog posts and outputs them as valid GPX, so you can take them with you on your GPS device. Other templates already include output as GeoRSS and KML.
• More video of developers at Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D. Laura Foy from 10 introduces the Microsoft Virtual Earth team and then gets a demo from Stephen Lawler, Virtual Earth’s general manager (“Mmm, it’s like a game.”). Lawler also discusses the Massive and Vexcel acquisitions, and promises to have eight new cities a month made into 3D, good for 100 cities next summer. He also says they’ll be looking at storefronts soon.
• If you haven’t had your fill after that, Virtual Earth 3D development manager Duncan Lawler explains Virtual Earth over on Microsoft’s Channel 9. This is more for geeks — Lawler doesn’t shy away from technical terms and code.
• Another database of georeferenced place names: WorldCityDB.com. This one contains several places I could find in Virtual Earth but not in Google Earth, for example, Sechery, a small hamlet in Belgium. So might this be the database Microsoft uses?
• Geospatial search engine Geody (which also contains “Sechery”) now comes in a special “narrow screen” version that easily integrates within NASA World Wind’s upcoming built-in browser, reports the Earth is Square (with screen grab). Which means this should also work with Google Earth, as Geody returns results in many formats.
• One user’s disappointment with Virtual Earth 3D.

• Two new examples of urban planning using Google Earth:
  • Robin Capper decided to fact-check official visualizations showing the impact of a controversial new planned waterside stadium in Auckland. It looked suspiciously low on these images when compared to existing buildings, so Robin built his own accurate model. Not surprisingly, it’s taller.
  • San Jose City Council has been using Google Earth to make flyovers of its General Plan, and has posted them online. (direct link to WMV file). It’s transit-oriented development project page also comes with the requisite KML version.
• A substantial MATLAB plugin: Matlab2GoogleEarth Toolbox by Scott Davis collects various plotting/drawing functions that can be saved as KML output, and loaded in Google Earth. Global weather modelling output, anyone? (Thanks, Sven!)
• Where 2.0 is announced, with a call for proposals. It’s set for May 29-30, 2007 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA. Proposals are due Jan 5.

Awesome: Google Maps now supports KML overlays! Just post a URL to a file in a Google Maps search box, and there it is. Here’s the new island in Tonga, as a Google Map.

Google Maps now also renders KML placemarks with images in popups, which means you can use Google Maps to view georeferenced Picasa photos that have been exported as a self-contained KMZ file to your desktop and then uploaded to a server (or Google Pages). That’s still more convoluted than uploading georeferenced photos directly to Picasa Web Albums and getting a Google Maps link built in, but it’s a good step in the right direction.

Finally, there is also support for custom icons in a KMZ file. (Via James Fee)

• I suspect you’ve already tried Frank Taylor and Barry Hunter’s very nice overlay combo of NASA’s Blue Marble imagery and global weather. If not, do check it out.

  Earlier, Frank wrote “This is the kind of thing Google should implement built-in to GE.” Yes and No, I think. There is no reason for Google to duplicate the efforts of dedicated amateurs, but there is every reason for Google to make available more such user-generated content in the default layers. In this way, Google can play the role of government, fulfilling those tasks not easily taken on by individuals. For example, I think that the Google Earth Community BBS remains too bewildering for more mainstream users, and that these users especially need to be nudged towards the best user-generated content. Another role for Google: providing content that is difficult to scale up by individuals, such as 3D textured buildings and high resolution height meshes.

• The Virtual Earth 3D plugin is now up to version 1.1, fixing the bug where only PCs localized for the US were able to connect. There is no need to download it again if it already works.
• Microsoft Research’s MapCruncher 3.0 is released. (Version 3.01, out Nov 20, fixes a problem with transparency in PDFs). MapCruncher is a PC application that lets you marry points on your overlay with points on the underlying map, to create an accurate combined map The link to the tutorial for version 3 is still dead, but the the tutorial for version 2 gives a very good idea of how it works — look, no code! I’ve found that it is easier to be accurate with MapCruncher than with Google Earth when placing overlays — and MapCruncher also works with the Virtual Earth 3D API.
• Brink Expedition, an Australian expedition around the world with educational aims, has put its GPS track into NASA World Wind. (Via The Earth is Square)
• Want to know where Dutch parties stand on Google Earth prior to voting in the parliamentary elections on Wednesday?
  

  2. Google should stop spreading maps of satelite images on Google Earth because they could be used by terrorists for planning attacks.

  PvdA: No
  CDA: No/neutral
  VVD: No
  SP: No
  GroenLinks: No
  ChristenUnie: Yes
  SGP: No/neutral

• Weekend Projects of a Geek: Using Python to utilize the Virtual Earth geocoding services on your PyS60 handset, and how to download the maps of the location of your choice.
• CarbonTools PRO Beta 2, a .NET SDK for location content, now supports Google Earth, Virtual Earth and Yahoo! Maps.
• Spiros has written an CPAN perl module that acts as an API for the Geograph.org.uk database of user-contributed photos of every square kilometer of the British Isles. Nestoria, a UK property search service, incorporates Geograph into their search results: Click on “Pics” under local information.
• What’s next for GeoIQ’s heatmaps, blogged here last week? Well, it depends on you, say the developers. Support for Google Earth is the top request.

Read Brian Timoney’s comment on the state of play in the geobrowser market.

• Worth promoting from the comments: Bernhard Sterzbach reports that he has updated his network link for serving Google Maps tiles in Google Earth. It now works with the newer API.
• If you have a Garmin Map, you can display it and interact with it on some of the fancier new phones with a mobile application called Vietnamese GPS (beta). I haven’t tried it, but somebody quite talented seems to be building a mobile mapping solution from scratch.
• Juicy Geography’s Google Earth page is turning into a blog, with RSS feed. Go there for tips on how to use Google Earth in the classroom.
• Dave Bouwman professes to a little sticker shock at what ESRI ArcGIS Server is rumored to cost, especially if all he wants to do is to serve some map tiles. Considering that Arc2Earth will soon do this at a fraction of the cost, might Brian Flood’s application suddenly become a lot more popular? How can I go long Arc2Earth?:-)
• An exceedingly slick promo video for Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D, shown at the launch of the service two weeks ago. This is Microsoft marketing firing on all cylinders. (Via Virtual Earth B2B)
• Tagzania adds direct links for its bookmarked locations to both Live Local and World Wind. Example. Nice touch: Live Local’s 3D links degrade gracefully to 2D views if you’re not running Microsoft.