After posting about the global place directory Tageo three weeks ago, I emailed them and suggested they add a link to an automatically generated KML placemark for each location in their database. They said they were looking into it. Today, I happened by there and noticed that now you get exactly that.

Suddenly, Tageo rocks as an ancillary to Google Earth: 2,667,417 coordinate pairs to go look up, a very forgiving search function (if it doesn’t get a direct hit, it makes clever suggestions) and a linked list of nearby places. I’m adding it to Ogle Earth’s list of essential tools.

Google Earth Community sysop PenguinOpus has announced that the “Katrina” layer in Google Maps over New Orleans is now available as an experimental network link in Google Earth.

It’s a view-based refresh network link, which fetches the Digital Globe data 2 seconds after your motion over New Orleans stops. What’s innovative here is that the data consists of tiles, just as in Maps, and is delivered via a PHP script, with URL http://dev.keyhole.com/katrina/dg/tileserver.php

I’d love to know what that PHP does:-) It looks like it accesses the exact same tiles as Google Maps does, depending on what level you are zoomed in, no doubt determined by the bounding box of your view, which the PHP script receives. As those tiles are all just small jpegs, the script would need to decide how many to fetch and how to arrange them.

Indeed, if you look at what the network link delivers, it is a list of overlays, each containing one tile, and each one being independently adjustable on/off and for transparency. Very nifty.

Do read the whole thread. It contains interesting feedback.

PS. This of course means that the Google Earth team, should it want to, could now deliver the original Google Map tiles to Google Earth via such a network link/server solution. Unlike with Google Maps, however, Google Earth is able to drape these tiles over height information, which would definitely be worth a look just to see if it results in something cool and/or useful.

[Update 2005-09-05: This network link is now also available from Google Earth’s main Katrina page.]

It’s not showing up via my update functionality in Google Earth, but if you download a fresh copy from the home page now you’ll get version 3.0.0548 Beta, up from 3.0.0529 Beta. Running the installer asks you if you want to update.

So far, updates have shown up in increments of x.x.01, so this one looks to be a little irregular. The release notes also appear to be identical, and I can’t actually spot any difference between the two versions. (Was the Dining feature there in Layers previously?) (Alerted here.]

Digital Earth Weblog’s final installment of its Google Earth Wishlist is out. Andrew Hallam would like public WMS services to provide more complete and more user friendly metadata for mainstream users, and also have them provide KML files for accessing the data using Google Earth.

But above all he would like Google Earth to have native support for WMS. Given that WMS is not currently aimed at the layman user I’d expect such a feature to be reserved for the Plus version.