Links: Navigator, Mobile Street View, Science cartograms

  • Navigator: Valery Hronusov has come out with yet another Google Earth-centric application — and this time, it’s free. Navigator takes your GPS device as input and displays a myriad of details regarding individual satellite positions, signal-to-noise ratios, error estimates, course, speed, etc… In other words, it works like your GPS on steroids, and it uses Google Earth as the map. For Windows only, so I haven’t managed to check it out, but don’t wait for me.
  • Google Maps for Mobile gets Street View: So announces Google Mobile Blog. Not for your iPhone, though. Perhaps an update is in the works — or can we expect future updates to come to Android first? For a sneak peek at what Google Maps for Android will look like, Mapperz has a video of a demonstration at the Google Developer Day held in London Sept 16. Alasdair Allan also has a report on “what’s new in geo” at the event.
  • US Science spending cartograms: Science magazine reporter Declan Butler has been geographically visualizing different science indicators across US states using cartograms, much like the ones we’ve gotten to know at WorldMapper. Declan used the open-source Java tool called Scapetoad to make his, which is based on the same (Gastner/Newman) algorithm WorldMapper uses. WorldMapper, BTW, will soon be releasing a book of its pretty cartograms, reports The Map Room.
  • Swiss Google Earth blog: Swiss Earth is Ronald Sautebin’s new blog about his country as seen in Google Earth. With part of the Google geo team recruited from Switzerland with the purchase of Endoxon in 2006, the country is certainly not short-shrifted in Google Earth. (In French)
  • Live English Channel Ships: KML of real-time ship positions in the English Channel, brought to you by EarthNC and English Channel Ship Movements Website. I didn’t know you have to keep to the right — did you?
  • Hurricane Ike imagery compared: Google Lat Long Blog points to KML overlays of post-hurricane Ike imagery Google has made available. Over on the Earth is Square, Chad compares it to the imagery provided directly by NOAA and finds NOAA’s imagery better.
  • Taking servers to the seas: Times Online reports that Google is mooting putting server farms out to sea, where they can use seawater for cooling and waves as an energy source. Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze wonders whether this could also be a way to avoid tax and censorship laws. As for property taxes, sure, why not avoid them, but when it comes to evading sovereignty, then I think you need to be a whole lot further offshore than the maximum 11 kilometers mooted in the Times article. Further issues: The data cables would have to hit land somewhere, which means regulation there — and if you truly were to be out in international waters, then who is going to protect Google’s servers? Gives the term ‘computer-piracy’ a whole new meaning. (And, yes, similarities to the giant off-shore city in Snow Crash have been noted.)
  • Drupal 6 + Google Earth: Dan Karran has updated the KML module for the Drupal content management system, with help from Robin Rainton. New feature: Caching of KML feeds and custom POI markers.
  • State of the Map in India: Calcutta’s The Telegraph vents its frustration at continued anachronistic regulations that require all maps published in India to be subject to a lengthy “authenticatation” process, meaning that borders must conform to the government’s political stance, even if they do not portray the situation on the ground. (Via All Points Blog)
  • Search SIMBAD via Google Sky (web): SIMBAD is the most extensive database of deep sky objects out there. In my review of Microsoft World Wide Telescope, I noted that you could do SIMBAD searches from within WWT, whereas you couldn’t in Google Sky. Now forum.nu lets you search SIMBAD and see the result in Google Sky (web). (Via Google Maps Mania)

I’m flying to Sweden tonight unexpectedly, as that bout of pneumonia I had in the spring has come back for seconds. Best to fix it properly this time — i.e. not in an Egyptian hospital. We’ll see if this means more time for blogging or less:-)

Links: Cairo by night, O3b, Google imagery update

I’m in Washington DC for the rest of the week for one of my day jobs, as project manager of the Second House of Sweden: The librarians at the Library of Congress are curious about Sweden’s experience using virtual worlds for public diplomacy, and Sweden is happy to share it, so I’ll be speaking at a forum on federal information policies here for the Federal Library and Information Center Committee. If the below is a bit unfocused, I’m blaming the jetlag.

  • Sense of place, Cairo edition: Friend and documentary filmmaker Oliver Wilkins made this stunning timelapse video of Cairo by night:


    Call to Cairo – D200 Timelapse from Oliver Wilkins on Vimeo.

    It really gives you a sense of the energy of this remarkable city. Moving here was a stroke of genius on my part:-)

  • 03b: O3b is a project to bring satellite broadband to the “other 3 billion” in the tropics… and you and me. Thanks to O3b Networks, HSBC, Liberty Global and Google, I can soon move to anywhere in Africa and be a full-fledged net worker from there… if the lag is acceptable. A bright connected future awaits not just the poor, but also extreme telecommuters.
  • Google Street View in ArcGIS Explorer! Here’s how.
  • Top 25 Blogs in GIS: My two cents is that for a niche topic like geoblogs, we’d lose a lot of variety if we all aimed to blog in a manner that maximized our rankings in such a list; I know I’d quickly get bored writing for my blog. I like to rant about obscure topics that I’m passionate about, technorati be damned.
  • Updated imagery removes photoshopping error: The latest announcement of updated imagery on Google Lat Long Blog also removes the photoshopping of Dutch imagery discovered a few weeks ago, with an explanation:

    It turned out to be an image-processing error that happened during our color-correction process, so we’ve removed it.

    Indeed, the spot in question now sports real trees. I think it’s interesting that the original post in Photoshop Disasters detailing the error got 120 comments; it should keep the image processing people at Google on their toes:-)

    The complete list of updates via Google Lat Long Blog is below the fold.

Continue reading Links: Cairo by night, O3b, Google imagery update

Do internet maps make us forget our culture?

Another person is wrong on the internet! Let me dispense with her arguments anon so we can finally get back to regularly scheduled blogging (as I will have my backlog nearly cleared)…

Internet maps will make us forget our culture: So warned Mary Spence, President of the British Cartographic Society, at a session on the Future of the Map at the annual conference in London of the Royal Geographical Society held on Aug 28. Google’s own Ed Parsons was on hand to offer a rebuttal. Said Spence:

Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history — not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography — at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day. We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique; giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.

The Map Room‘s Jonathan Crowe has already mustered all the salient arguments in defence of internet mapping, while Catholic Gauze and GIS Lounge add worthy points. I have a few of my own.

Spence argues that the answer is Open Street Map, a wonderful crowdsourcing effort to create a Creative Commons dataset of maps and points of interest (POIs), in effect duplicating Google’s efforts but without the proprietary ownership model for the resulting data. She likes them because OSM in the UK shows POIs by default, showing churches but also public parking garages, pubs, mailboxes, bus stops and bike paths. Here’s an OSM closeup of Cambridge:

But what if I’m not interested in pubs, or don’t have a car I need to park? And further down the line, who decides what is appropriate to add to a default layer — are pubs in Cairo an OK addition to OSM’s base layer? What about places of worship in the UK that are not in old church-like buildings? Isn’t it just more useful to separate the base map from the POIs and let users add layers for churches — or beer — if they are so inclined? Isn’t the presumption of monolithic culture something we’re trying to outgrow? (And hasn’t Google made it ridiculously easy, BTW, to turn on such layers in Google Earth, even including layers with photos of landmarks where the density of photo placemarks is excellent proxy for relative cultural importance?)

Second, Spence is convinced that UK Ordnance Survey maps would never make the mistake of omitting her beloved cathedrals from their default map. In that case, a solution to all her problems is at hand: Have the Ordnance Survey release its maps to the online public, just as Google and Microsoft and Yahoo have done. Better yet, have OS mine its geo-database and publish to the public domain standards-compliant KML for all UK cathedrals, all battles, all historical monuments — just as the Swedes have done — so that map users like Mary Spence will never again be forced to look at a context-free “corporate” map.

Oh, you mean Ordnance Survey doesn’t want to play?

Perhaps Spence could ask nicely?

Google and censorship — setting the record straight

Oh no, someone is wrong on the internet again! In this particular case, there’s been a slew of articles lately implying google is complying with government demands for censorship when that isn’t the case, so I need to set the record straight.

Cheney’s House:

This story seems to repeat once a year: This year Sharon Weinberger in Wired’s Danger Room blog got the ball rolling when she asked why imagery of the vice president’s house is blurred on Google Earth — or more precisely, asking why Google Earth is blurring the vice president’s house.

The blog eventually got a response from Google — that it sometimes uses imagery that is already blurred by the source, and that other mapping providers like Yahoo and Microsoft have similar imagery — but the headline of the post, “Why is Google Earth Hiding Dick Cheney’s House?” remains unchanged, implying agency where there is none.

I’ve asked people at Google familiar with the matter about this: If the specific imagery of Observatory Hill provided by the USGS and used by Google has been blurred due to of out-dated and out-of-place cold-war concerns, why not just get an unblurred version in the public domain via other channels, like Ask.com has done?

houseask.jpg

At the very least, it would prevent bloggers from bothering Google spokespeople every couple of months asking about Dick Cheney’s house. The answer is that Google is looking for replacement data, but getting the licensing rights to publish it to the web can be tricky and/or expensive. That’s a far cry from a conspiracy to censor.

51 things:

Also in July, ITSecurity came out with a list of “51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps” that got Dugg and saw widespread re-reporting; and here too, agency is implied where there is none:

Whether it’s due to government restrictions, personal-privacy lawsuits or mistakes, Google Maps has slapped a “Prohibited” sign on the following 51 places.

But of the 51 items posted, in only one case did Google actively roll back imagery for security reasons at a government’s behest — in Basra, Iraq in January 2007. (Street View imagery removed because it was mistakenly taken from private property is not interesting from a censorship perspective.)

In the cases of blurred bases in the Netherlands and blurred energy sites or research labs in the US: that’s because the aerial imagery used was censored by local authorities before being released to the public. Google could, if it wanted to, use satellite imagery from other sources that show these areas unblurred, but chose not to, either for cost reasons or because it figured that the quality of the higher resolution aerial imagery offset the downside of having some specific sites blurred. Again, no agency on the part of Google.

So why couldn’t Google offer multiple imagery datasets — say a base dataset with 15m imagery plus DigitalGlobe’s content, and a dataset for higher resolution aerial imagery that might be censored in places? I’m sure that it could if it had an unlimited budget and unlimited development resources — and in that case, there are many more other items on my wish list: a historical database of datasets, for example. It’s just that Google doesn’t have unlimited resources, and it isn’t obliged to spend those resources it has on actively circumventing pre-existing censorship.

In other cases, ITSecurity’s list is just plain wrong: I don’t know why this meme continues to persist, but Google has not censored any imagery in India (see item #24) — I had this confirmed to me again recently. Nor has Yona in Guam been censored (item #27). It’s easy to make a list like this if accuracy in reporting is not important. It certainly doesn’t help that there are a lot of inaccurate articles out there on the web being returned in search results and subsequently referenced. Still, it doesn’t reflect well on the credibility of ITSecurity, which is ostensibly a serious news site.

Raw Story:

The Raw Story’s John Byrne, in an article from Aug 26 entitled “Google Earth increasingly compliant with censorship requests: US intelligence report” uncritically re-reports ITSecurity’s “list” as factual but also rewrites a report by the US government’s Open Source Center from July 30, 2008. Surprise surprise, the report is rife with factual errors:

After the Basra incident, Google Earth seemingly became more open to dealing directly with foreign governments to assuage their security concerns. It agreed to blot out British bases in Iraq and other sensitive UK installations such as the eavesdropping base at Cheltenham and the Trident nuclear submarine pens in Faslane, Scotland.

No it did not. Nor is there any evidence of imagery being blurred at the Chinese government’s request, as the report insinuates. (Satellite imagery is not available to those inside the great Chinese firewall, but that isn’t the rest of the world’s problem.)

The Raw Story’s Byrne re-reports as fact further errors from ITSecurity’s “list”:

Among the areas Google blurs out in China includes, not surprisingly, Tibet/Xinjiang Province. Other areas of Asia that have been clouded include northern areas of Pakistan — it’s unknown why or who might have requested the omission.

That’s just a ridiculous statement. Does anyone even bother to fact check any more? Tibet, Xinjiang and Pakistan’s Northern Areas are riddled with high resolution imagery squares from DigitalGlobe. Where is the censorship? Are these people so clueless that they assume that areas without high resolution imagery are censored?

Is it a big deal that these stories are out there on the web? The main problem is that people read them uncritically, assume they are factually correct, and sometimes even re-report this fiction further as fact, as informationWeek and Strategy Page did. Eventually, it becomes the received wisdom that governments can get their way with Google, when the reality is very different. I abhor censorship of my mapping data as much as anyone (if not more) but I think it is very important to sift actual cases from urban myths, and in general the web is failing dismally at this task.

Inca X: Embedded live georeferenced video

Hot on the heels of the Ipoki-Qik collaboration, which shows live, GPS-georeferenced mobile video side by side with an updating map, Windows Mobile developer Inca X has come out with Live Media for Mobile that achieves the same feat. Though Qik/Ipoki work with both Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile, Live Media (for Windows Mobile only) does let you embed the combined output in one easy step to any web site, as Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton shows (Silverlight permitting):

That’s a cool and useful feature; certainly something I’d want on my site next time I’m on a road-trip in an area smothered in cell phone towers and unlimited data plans. Sweden comes to mind:-) [Caveat: Doesn’t seem to work well with Safari on a Mac – Firefox is fine.]

Links: GeoEye-1 launched, Geolocator, satellite tracker

Links: India river changes course, AGU meet deadline, cities at night

The past few weeks haven’t given me much opportunity to blog on Ogle Earth, but I did keep up the monitoring, so now that I am back in Cairo and settled in here’s a first attempt at getting some recent (and not so recent) news out the door, with commentary where useful:

  • Monsoon changes map of India: Monsoon rains in Bihar, India, changed the course of the Kosi river during August, displacing millions of people from their homes, reports the BBC (with new imagery). UNOSAT has updated flood maps from the past few weeks. I’ve georeferenced the top one and turned it into a KMZ file to download.
  • AGU Fall meet abstracts deadline looms: The 2008 Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union will be held on 15-19 December 2008. John E Bailey reminds us that the deadline for submissions of abstracts for the Virtual Globes session is September 10.
  • Cities at night: Wonderful night photography from the International Space Station:

  • Flickr loves KML, cont.: Flickr’s Dan Catt continues to show how the photo sharing site stays at the forefront of making its API geo-format-friendly. More on the code.Flickr blog: API Responses as Feeds. Combined with social location broker Fire Eagle, Yahoo continues to punch way above its weight in ways that would make Thatcher proud. Could it be the best thing that Yahoo has going right now?
  • Trouble in the Kalahari: I stumbled across this closely packed placemark collection posted to Google Earth Commuity while ogling the lovely new Spot Image imagery in Botswana. Remarkable how areas that appear to be empty at first sight are teeming with interesting content.
  • WorldWide Telescope downloads top 1 million: Microsoft WorldWide Telescope hits the 1 million download mark. That’s quite a lot of downloads for an atlas of the sky, which, lets face it, is a lot more of a niche product than a 3D atlas of Earth.
  • Google geo-schema: Barry Hunter published a schematic overview of how all of Google’s geo properties relate to one another. It’s quite hilarious:

    geoindex-thumb.gif

  • Photoshopped Netherlands: Photoshop Disasters discovers a bit of the Netherlands that’s been photoshopped on Google Earth. Most likely the explanation is innocuous, but it’s remarkable nonetheless, because the Netherlands has a policy of clearly marking censorship on aerial imagery taking within its jurisdiction. Google is investigating, reports Stinky Journalism.
  • RoofRay: Getting solar panels in northern Sweden might not be a good idea, financially. In Cairo, it’s another story. RoofRay.com calculates how much wattage you can wring from your roof’s surface area were you to slather it solar panels, simply by drawing the shape of your roof on top of Google Maps, and inputting the roof’s inclination. The web application takes into account your latitude, and presto, a cost estimate. Very clever (if your roof is in a high resolution area). (Via RiverWired)
  • GPS2Aperture Lite out of beta: Geotagging application GPS2Aperture for Mac’s Aperture photo management software is out of beta. Writes the developer, Ian Wood: “It’s temporarily changed to only tag referenced files but that will be changing as part of the process of finishing off the pro version.” Ian’s also looking for beta testers of the pro version.
  • Chrome Earth: Google releases its own browser, Chrome. Chrome is going to be Google’s way of making the operating system irrelevant when it comes to getting most everyday tasks done — a faster, more stable cloud computing terminal than current browsers. (Having tried cloud computing this summer, I’d say speed and responsiveness are crucial if cloud computing is going to replace desktop apps.) Chrome doesn’t support the Google Earth plugin just yet, but considering how Chrome is optimized for Javascript and Google Gears, I think it is only a matter of time before the functionality of the standalone Google Earth (such as the sidebar) gets replicated and begins rivalling the original. I’d love to be able to save and share my places; I suspect Chrome will make this feasible. (A Mac version is in the works.)
  • GeoEye and Google in exclusivity deal: In a deal similar to the one made with DigitalGlobe two years ago, Google has the exclusive online rights to the imagery coming from the new GeoEye-1 satellite being launched September 6 7, tropical storm permitting.
  • Wikiloc hits the big time: Wikiloc is a GPS community started by Jordi L Ramot back in 2006, and it was first blogged on Ogle Earth soon after it had won the Google Maps Mashup contents prize. Honorable mention in that contest went to a photo sharing site called Panoramio (and we now all know where it ended up) so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the announcement that Google has chosen to elevate Wikiloc as the repository for GPS tracks shown by default in Google Earth. Just as with Panoramio, expect the popularity of Wikiloc to explode — having your tracks appear on a Google Earth default layer should be an irresistible draw for GPS-enabled hikers. (Oh, and what is it about the Iberian peninsula that creates star geo-coders?)
  • Photosynth launched: Microsoft’s Photosynth 3D photo matching software has gone live, as a standalone Windows application with a plugin for viewing in Windows browsers. A Mac version is in the works. O’Reilly Radar has a thorough post.
  • All that’s round… Is not necessarily a meteorite crater. Try telling that to a man in New Jersey however, who’s convinced that round features in Australia constitute a crater from an impact half a billion years ago. Others are skeptical.
  • Google Earth, mistrial enabler: A juror on a manslaughter trial in the UK decided to investigate the case further on his own initiative, using Google Earth among other tools. The judge hears about it and halts the trial.

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