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Live Paragliding in Google Earth

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Until this morning I had never heard of the XAlps, “the ultimate paragliding race,” where contestants paraglide 800km across the Alps, east to west, without mechanized help. The race started today, August 1, in Austria. You compete by climbing to the tops of mountains with your equipment and then jumping off, gliding as far west as possible, climbing up the next one, jumping off, and repeating this all the way into Monaco.

I found all this out via Geared Up blog, which also pointed out that the 17 contestants this year are wearing GPS trackers, whose data get turned into Google Earth KML files, available for download.

Aha! The future of sport, I thought, only to find the reality akin to making it to Lake Geneva and then drowning: The KMZ files are very hard to find, are offered as static downloads, and even then only on a per-contestant basis. That’s so close, so why not go the last mile?

Luckily, the individual KML files automatically get published to the same URL and are regularly replaced. This made constructing dynamic network links out of the 17 files and collecting them into one downloadable, annotated KMZ relatively straightforward.

glide-xalps-2005.jpg

Here it is [KMZ].

I’ve set them to update every hour. The gliding paths they produce are wonderful, punctuated by climbs up the next hill. It’s truly the best way to see this race, and every future endurance race. (I’m rooting for Team 9.)

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GoogleTouring

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GoogleTouring adds a new twist to the Google Earth sightseeing concept, collecting related points of interest into a downloadable playable tour, with annotations. All we need now is to figure out a way to add sound:-) (Thanks Manuel!)

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GEOSnapper gets its dynamic link

The more geotagged pictures the merrier, which is why it’s a good thing that GEOsnapper gets its own dynamic network link to put next to the one for Flickr in Google Earth.

There are fewer GEOSnapper pictures than geotagged Flickr ones, it looks like, but GEOSnapper pictures certainly look more considered — i.e., fewer holiday snaps and more postcard-like panoramas, in the main.

YOu can get the network link on Google Earth Hacks.

Reviews

Chicago Tribune columnist makes stuff up

A very confused James Coates in the Chicago Tribune does a comparison between Google Earth and MSN Virtual Earth, and doesn’t once mention Google Maps. He also gets his facts wrong on several counts, for example:

With the fancy satellite photos replacing (if you want) traditional road and street maps, both outfits offer slick tour features.

That’s not the case, clearly. But the biggest problem with this column is that he basically makes up how he assumes Bill Gates must have come across Google Earth, to which Virtual Earth is the response:

Word has it that Bill Gates, potentate of propeller heads, went bonkers when he sat down, logged on to www.earth.google.com and saw Google’s stunning marriage of satellite photos and Web search engines.

It went something like this: Gates typed in a street address, town and state and watched as an image of the entire Earth floating in space began to spin.

It goes on, until he has Gates ordering development of his own version. “Word has it”? Google Earth only came out three weeks before MSN Virtual Earth. Gates would have seen Keyhole, Google Earth’s precursor, and could have done so ages ago, though not at that URL. Furthermore, it’s pretty well documented that Virtual Earth emerged from a company-wide contest, and that it was put on a fast track by Gates in response to Google Maps:

Google released Google Maps in February, a time when [Mark Law, lead product manager for Virtual Earth] said Microsoft already was working on Virtual Earth as the result of an idea sent to what he called the “world’s coolest suggestion box.” He explained that every year at Microsoft, employees can suggest a product or an idea they think should be developed and have the opportunity to present it to Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates.

The idea for Virtual Earth found its way to Gates last fall. He decided in February 2005 that the product should be ready for launch by July, Law said.

So either Law is lying, or Coates just makes stuff up.

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Google Earth Hacks adds features

Google Earth Hacks, a great repository of placemarks, layers and 3D models, gets a host of new features: User file ratings, top submitters, categorization by country or US state, advanced search and more.

They’re also on the look-out for new feature requests. Here is one: How about linking the images associated with file downloads of placemarks to their respective spot in Google Maps, so we can preview the placemark if we’re not near a Google Earth. If Google Maps-oriented sites can re-orient themselves to provide KML, Google Earth-oriented sites could easily do the same and offer linkage to Google Maps.

Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.