“After mulling it over, we think there will be a business here — eventually,” they write, though they feel the application won’t really get off the ground until it moves to cell phones and PDAs. This is a strange thing to think, as there are plenty of applications, for example web browsers and the Google search service itself, that became wildly popular before they became mobile and minute.
And while there certainly is a future in Google Earth for advertising dollars, the article does not recognize why Google Earth (and Google Maps) is a disruptive technology: It uses open standards, not proprietary ones, and it encourages user contributions and hacking by making its APIs and XML accessible. Google Earth will be a runaway success because it will make itself useful to users in ways that Google itself does not try to fathom, though Google will control the ability to advertise on the results of this user creativity. That’s very clever.
Loading up the larger size, sitting back and screwing up my eyes worked like a charm for me.
This suddenly made me wish stereograms were an option in the Google Earth app proper, so that you could turn these static stereoscopic images into real live video as you browse the world…
Some spots on Google’s Earth offer more rewarding browsing than others — the hi-res ones, visually depicted here. The images on the other side of that link show some unlikely spots for hi-resolution imagery; in Europe, the northwest Portuguese coast, Corsica and Sardinia are shown offering rewarding closeups.
Quebecois blogger Steven Mansour wants Google Earth to show wifi hotspots, and goes on to outline a method in which local wifi activists could publish KML files pinpointing the locations.
In the meantime, gwifi is showing it is possible to scrape wifi hotspot geodata and map it onto Google Maps. But it doesn’t do locations outside the US, nor does it produce KML files for Google Earth (yet). Jiwire does have a global repository of hotspots (69 in Stockholm alone), but does not provide this data in a version that Google Maps or Google Earth can read. Soon, please. (LifeHacker is also asking nicely).
This post comes better late than never, but if you speak Swedish, frisim has a KML network link for Google Earth that links local Swedish news to their respective locations.
Only last week I was fantasizing about how cool it would be to map one’s GPS coordinates in real time onto Google Earth while flying across the Atlantic with Scandinavian Airlines and connecting to the internet using the onboard wifi.
This week, it would seem that we’re already almost there. Brady Davis
and Jeffrey Hicks have hacked Google Maps to bring you the DIY Real Time GPS Tracker. It currently works with Google Maps, not (yet?) Google Earth, and it isn’t for the programmatically challenged, but it is most impressive.
Given that the conversion tools from Google Maps to Google Earth already exist, tracking onto Google Earth can’t be too far away, can it?
Google Maps and Google Earth are just different perspectives on the same data, so it was only a matter of time before somebody would make the conversion tools between Google Earth’s KML files and Google Maps’s URLs. That person would be Phillipe Gouillou.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
