This is why I rarely listen to podcasts: You don’t know what’s in them until you listen to them. You can’t scan them for interesting content, nor can you find them using a search engine. That said, some podcasts do contain interesting information, information that makes you wish there was a transcript.

That’s the case with the ArcGIS Explorer Overview podcast, posted to the ESRI ArcGIS explorer home page in lieu of the actual application, which everybody’s been expecting to find there for several days now. The podcast is worth listening to. First thing I learned is that you have to say “Eeh Ess Argh Eye” instead of ESRI, rather like calling NASA “En Ay Ess Ay”. Bernie Szukalski, a product manager at Eeh Ess Argh Eye, is interviewed about ArcGIS Explorer, and is eager to position the application as something other than a competitor for Google Earth — here is his response to a question about what the major differences are between ArcGIS Explorer and Google Earth:

First, ArcGIS Explorer has been designed from the ground up to be a deeply integrated, integral part of the ArcGIS family of products, and specifically, its been designed to be an excellent client for ArcGIS server, and provide a way for people to publish GIS capabilities to whomever they choose, either within their organization or to anyone on the web. So, first and foremost, ArcGIS Explorer is designed to be part of an overall GIS system, and not a standalone consumer product.

Second, while we publish a globe of worldwide imagery that is similar to Google Earth’s globe, we’ll also publish a series of globes — we call these ArcGIS online services. And these globes will include worldwide streets, terrain, boundaries, labels, political maps, physiography and a whole lot more. So our product is not meant to focus on a single globe but on many globes, and more importantly these globes will represent the foundations upon which our users will publish their data on top of.

You mean like default layers in Google Earth? Oh, wait, I don’t get to ask the questions.

But Szukalski’s explanation of the concept of “tasks” and “results” in ArcGIS Explorer later on in the podcast is genuinely interesting, and makes me eager to try it out. It sounds intuitively right, it produces XML, and its modular nature also sounds promising. He also mentions how the application will be able to work not just with ArcGIS Server but with “any web service,” such as a web service offering financial reports. This could be interesting, depending on how it works: Imagine being able to query Flickr Maps for keywords directly from within ArcGIS Explorer, as a plugin.

Well, I thought IKEA would have done this by now, but in the event it turns out to be Whirlpool that is the first company to officially put fully virtualized 3D models of its home appliances onto Google’s 3D Warehouse, ready for you to place in your dream SketchUp home. Here is the press release to prove it, and here is a direct link to the Whirlpool models in 3D Warehouse. Talk about viral marketing in the abundance economy!

Expect everybody else to follow suit. In a few years, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ll be able to push a “buy” button in SketchUp and have your inventory of virtual home furniture materialize on your doorstep. With a cut to Google, of course.

For the next three weeks, I’ll be blogging pretty much full-time at Economonitor.com, replacing Felix Salmon while he takes a well-deserved holiday. I expect the first few days to be rough going as I take a running dive back into the world of macroeconomics and high finance, so bear with me when it comes to Ogle Earth’s posting frequency. Meanwhile:

• Now that the heavy lifting has been done at Live local (I’m guessing), Microsoft’s MapPoint guru Chandu Thota is moving on… to ASP.NET.
• If you haven’t read it yet, a fascinating article about the indigenous people of the Amazon, and how technology is helping these deeply geospatial people to preserve their cultural heritage, much of which is georeferenced to places in the forest. GPS devices, Google Earth and conservationists all play a role.
• EDUCAUSE has released a short PDF aimed at teachers: 7 Things You Should Know About Google Earth. A quick read, but this also means there is nothing by way of links to online resources for teachers.
• Geogreeting: Write with imagery from the Google Earth/Maps dataset.
• Pete Brunelli writes in to point out that NASA’s Earth Observatory has begun adding a KMZ file download option for some of is satellite images — for example, as with this image of Saharan sand over the Canary Islands. (Scroll to the bottom of the page.)

• John J. Gardiner, Google technical writer and blogger at Google Earth User, has a couple of new tutorials out on the official Google Earth Tutorials page.
• While we’re on the topic of Google Earth tutorials, what the hell is this? I think it is either a flytrap for catching email addresses to spam (“Also included with your free membership are exclusive benefits only our members get”) or else an attempt to garner Google juice for some nefarious purpose later. The content is either generic or else copied wholesale from Richard Treves’ excellent series of KoKae screencasts.
• Mentioned by commenters but not yet in a post here on Ogle Earth: Tiles2KML is another superoverlay creator, joining Superoverlay and Super Overlay Tiler. My only concern: The home page sports bogus 5-star ratings banners. Ew.
• It’s understandable for Google Earth to miss out on brand new islands. Less so when the island in question is one of the most important cultural heritage sites in Europe. I want my Skellig Michael. (Don’t look for it here; here it is instead in Virtual Earth)
• Because the Belgian military is afraid of Google Earth, Belgeoblog‘s Pascal Laureyn created a placemark collection of all Belgian military bases. Where did he get the pointers for his dangerous placemarks? From a list of addresses on the Belgian military’s own website.
• Got coordinate data in a MATLAB file? This script will export it to KML for you.
• In a post on Geobloggers, Rev Dan Catt shows how Flickr really gets the geospatial semantic web: Support for different microformats in HTML, support for GeoRSS, and geocoding from a URL are all steps that make life easy for savvy users and casual programmers. Make these people happy, and gaining market share is a downhill battle. (Better late than never, Via The Map Room)

Back in August, Fredrik Fransson and some fellow Swedes were sailing in the South Pacific around Tonga when they came across a sea of pumice stones and then a brand new erupting Island. Fredrik documented this with some amazing photos on his blog. NASA came calling, asking for the coordinates, and took a picture, which has now been published (NASA permalink).

As a result, the news has hit the mainstream over the past few days, reported by the AFP and AP in English and in Swedish papers (here and here) among others. Ogle Earth reader Lars Karlsson emailed the sailors to ask for the exact coordinates, and got them: 18deg.59.5S 174deg.46.3W

The above link is to the placemark in Google Earth. Turn on the Google Earth Community Layer and you’ll also see a marker for “Home Reef” at nearly the same spot: Home Reef is one of nearly 2,000 “major or isolated islands” as registered by the United Nations Environment Program. Here’s the entry for Home Reef, where it is currently described an active submarine volcano. I guess that database is now in need of an update.

The NASA picture was just begging to be overlaid onto Google Earth, so I obliged — download it here. As you’ll see, the Swedes’ coordinates are spot on. (Or rather, NASA was:-)

This isn’t Google Earth-related, but it is a censorship question involving toponomy and border issues, with a strong whiff of Borat about it, so here goes:

Somebody’s posted a video to Google Video that claims the Iranian city of Tabriz is actually in southern Azerbaijan. It’s a breezy but calculated insult, much like the doings of the Frenchman on the rampart in the Monty Python movie The Holy Grail.

But horrors, Iran’s government seems to have fallen hook, line and sinker for the video, and are now urging Iranians to vent their wrath on Google,