• Australia, Japan get Street View: Amazing — Australia is now smothered in blue Street View lines in Google Maps — including some of the most out-of-the-way places you can imagine:

  
  View Larger Map

  

  The Australian‘s take: “Privacy advocates say Google’s gone too far,” though not, it turns out, Australia’s Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner, which thinks Google’s approach is fair dinkum enough. Japan too gets some of its main cities covered. Thanks to Claudia Carvalho for the tip.

• Olym-pics not for the Chinese: Google’s recently updated satellite imagery of the brand-new Olympic stadiums in Beijing — which would provide ample opportunity for the Chinese to feel proud — is alas not available to ordinary Chinese, as inside the Great Chinese Firewall Google’s Chinese-language Ditu Maps service does not have a satellite imagery layer at all. Because, you know, all those domestic terrorists would never dream of using a proxy server to maps.google.com.
• OneGeology outputs to KML: It turns out that OneGeology, previously flagged on Ogle Earth but not tested due to browser limitations, outputs to KML, as Hypocentre points out Now that I’ve had access to IE7 for a bit, I can confirm that the exported view-based network link works great in Google Earth. All Points Blog also lauds the data, but comments that the site’s technical underpinnings is a bit dated. As far as I’m concerned, the KML links for the regional layers serve all my needs — it would be great to offer them as a list of links on a plain-vanilla web page that don’t depend on a small subset of browsers or the map view — I know where Africa is:-) Oh and a KML layer with the key would make it perfect.

  

• 3DXplorer – new Java-based virtual world: Serendipitously, just a few days after Avi Bar-Zeev clarifies the difference between two different kind of “browser-based” 3D virtual worlds/globes (one kind requires a plugin be installed, the other relies on the browser’s own resources — which is a much harder feat to pull off) an avatar-driven virtual world of the second kind is announced: 3DXplorer. Tantalizingly, it supports COLLADA models of the kind made by SketchUp and found in Google 3D Warehouse. In other words, you can create your own virtual worlds on your own website, populate it with existing 3D content, and let anyone with a free 3DXplorer account visit. That could well be a winning formula, with a free hosting option for low-traffic sites and paid options that are competitive with Second Life, depending on usage patterns. It runs in java 1.6, which alas Apple has been tardy shipping as a default with OS X (it’s still at 1.5). The main constraint, I suspect: It doesn’t look as slick as Second Life.
• Mapufacture + GeoCommons: Geoweb pioneer Mapufacture, with its early support for syndicated georeferenced content via GeoRSS, is being acquired by FortiusOne, which is democratizing access to complex GIS databases via its GeoCommons platform. As Mapufacture’s Mikel Maron, Andrew Turner and FortiusOne’s Sean Gorman explain it, the two services are complementary and hence a perfect fit — Sean Gorman:
  

  The long term vision has been to eventually fuse the personal and dynamic data of the GeoWeb (long tail) [Mapufacture] with the static and statistical data of GIS (short tail) [Geocommons].

  I think it’s wonderful that there is consolidation afoot among the social geoentrepreneurs — there are some very big fish in the geospatial pond.

• Earthmine update: O’Reilly Radar updates us on progress with Earthmine, which is working on an API to integrate its “Street View on steroids” into third party web sites. Don’t know about Earthmine yet? You need to check out this video.
• Landsat to go free: Announced today: 35 years of archived Landsat imagery will be made freely available on the web by the end of 2008. The U.S. Geological Survey will be hosting the data, which is good news — the USGS is an enthusiastic adopter of KML for many of its other projects. Depending on how comprehensively this dataset is integrated with Google Earth et. al., we’ll soon be able to browse the Earth in time as well as in space.

That demonstrably frivolous lawsuit filed by Jonathan Cobb back in February 2008, alleging that Google stole the idea of Google Sky from him? Dismissed. This just arived in my feed reader via the RSS feed tracking the case:

Cobb v. Google, Inc. et al Docket Report Updated 2008-08-01

MEMORANDUM OPINION, The Court GRANTS defendant’s motion to dismiss and DENIES plaintiff’s motion for declaratory judgment. Signed by Judge Richard J. Leon on 7/30/08. (kc) (Entered: 07/31/2008)

ORDER granting defendant’s Motion 43 to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction; denying plaintiff’s Motion 44 for Declaratory Judgment. ORDERED that judgment is entered for defendant. SO ORDERED. Signed by Judge Richard J. Leon on 7/30/08. (kc) (Entered: 07/31/2008)

This case tracking page should soon be updated with that new information.

For the first time since I’ve started looking, a high resolution satellite image of Jerusalem is available on the web. Until now, such imagery has not been available because of an inane pre-geoweb US law called the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, which prohibits US satellite operators like Digital Globe from selling imagery of Israel and the Palestinian Territories at resolutions higher than what is commercially available in the rest of the world (currently 2m per pixel). I’ve ranted about Kyl-Bingaman before.

Imagine my pleasant surprise to find Chris Pendleton blogging a new service by TerraPixel that lets you “patch” bits of Microsoft Virtual Earth where the imagery might be low-resolution of old, replacing it with your own imagery, or imagery provided by TerraPixel.

Chris points to TerraPixel’s demo, and specifically to the “Holy Patch” sample, which overlays a high resolution map of Jerusalem’s old city over Virtual Earth’s pixellated base layer (courtesy of Messrs. Kyl and Bingaman). Wonderful!

Interestingly, the image has some metadata stamped right on it:

That seems to point to an acquisition date of 1998 (alas Hebrew is not a script I’ve mustered), though this would jar with TerraPixel’s own description of the patch:

Also, I’m not so sure the high resolution imagery is 6 inches per per pixel. I’m guessing it’s more like 50cm per pixel.

Still, now that such imagery is in the wild, here’s hoping that this officially makes the Kyl-Bingaman amendment moot and that we can soon all enjoy high resolution shots of Ceasarea, Armageddon, Askelon, Masada, Bet She’an and Jericho.

What is it about Europeans that makes them so susceptible to populist arguments in favor of expectations of privacy in a public space? Sure, Google does not have the legal right to drive on private roads and photograph from there, as it appears to have done on two documented occasions in the US. That is a clear-cut case. In Europe, however, Street View is getting a steady onslaught of negative publicity, mainly instigated by populist newspapers, about the evils of taking photography in a public place and publishing it.

British tabloids are the worst offenders when it comes to tendentious reporting. For example, This is London‘s article is titled “Big Brother: The Google cars that will photograph EVERY front door in Britain“, and contains the ridiculous

Critics say the site can be used by burglars planning escape routes from homes and by terrorists looking for military bases. The site has even been used by teenagers arranging unauthorised swimming parties in unoccupied homes.

I love the “even”, as if terrorism is bad enough, but unauthorised swimming parties are beyond the pale.

The Liverpool Daily Post titled its article “Google Street View comes to Liverpool amid privacy fears” though without finding any civilians expressing said fears. The Mail on Sunday, today: Google ‘burglar’s charter’ street cameras given the all clear by privacy watchdog The BBC has a proper neutral take: Google Street View gets go ahead.

(None of the tabloids, of course, have picked up on the irony that their paparazzi constantly flout the privacy of their “marks” out in the public space, pictures of which they then sell to an eager readership now being urged to defend its right to privacy.)

German media too is hunting for privacy officials that are complaining, even if, as Bloomberg reports, “federal and state data-protection agents have yet to find a legal basis to hinder filming that’s carried out by cameras mounted on vehicles.”

“From a privacy viewpoint, we don’t welcome this activity,” Federal Commission spokesman Dietmar Mueller said in an interview today. “Yet we have no legal instance to challenge it — anyone can walk along a street with a camera.”

What a strange concept: Government officials complaining that a company is observing the law, but that they don’t like it anyway.

The right to privacy of an individual is not a absolute right — as by necessity it constrains the freedom of other individuals to document and record their surroundings. As a sometime photographer and journalist myself, I believe there should not be any expectations of privacy in public places (as opposed to private spaces and inside homes, though not in front of windows visible from public spaces). If you’re going to Disney World on a sick day or to a sleazy club instead of bowling, and I or Google accidentally take a snapshot of you and post it to Flickr or Street View, then that should be the end of it. The truth is out there — why smudge it?

On July 30, the Sri Lankan air force bombed what they allege is a Tamil Tiger training camp, and released the video. Bloggers (and the local media) have been quick to locate the spot on Google Earth, where you can see high resolution imagery taken from 2003, before structures on the location were built.

Here is the Google Map of the place:

View Larger Map

Here is a still from the military-supplied video. Click to see the YouTube video:

I went looking at Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s imagery to see if they might have more recent hi-res imagery, but both maxed out at 15 meters per pixel. It’s in places like these, not in cities, where I get impressed when there is sub-meter resolution, even if it’s from 2003. This is one more reason why globally Google Earth and Map’s uptake is so much higher than the competition.

It occurred to me just the other day that NOAA’s Eric Hackathorn, whom I had met last year at ISDE5, had then said that he was thinking of making a programmable virtual globe in Second Life. I fired off an email to him wondering if he’d ever followed up on that idea. Sure enough, he writes that late last year he and his game-developer wife (SL name) Zora Spoonhammer created “Sculpty Earth” which was then extensively reviewed by Wagner James Au in New World Notes. YouTube excerpt:

A clever piece of hacking projects a movie of recent global cloud map images onto a transparent array floating above the Earth, letting you follow cloud patterns.

Very Caspar David Friedrich of me, no?

But that wasn’t the end of the project. In the last few months the duo have created two more Earths, both works in progress. Below one of them you’ll find a Google Maps application projected onto a plane that lets you load KML files, and which is controlled by nearby buttons. I managed to load some of my own KML content, and navigate around, albeit clumsily.

And while you also can’t click on the map to navigate or interact with the KML, the important point to take home from this proof of concept is that visitors are engaging in social cartography — anything that my avatar pulls up, your avatar can see too in real time. SL developers Daden Limited used similar technology in their Second Life Google Maps, blogged here a few months ago.

The map also lets you get a geosearch going:

Sure enough, when I went looking on the virtual globe:

There are far more efficient ways of finding Cairo, of course, but that’s not the point — these are the first steps in radically new ways of navigating information.

Independently, I got an email from Magnus Zeisig where he writes that the interest in his recently reviewed Second Life map of Sweden had compelled him to experiment with making an entire virtual globe in Second Life. He’d also just found Eric and Zora’s Earth — his in comparison is smaller, but with vertical heights exaggerated 100-fold and with accurate bathymetry. And if you walk into the Earth’s center, you’ll see an exhibition he is building about different map projections.

All these Earths aren’t nearly as smooth as dedicated virtual globe applications, or even browser-based virtual globes. That’s because Second Life is a general-purpose 3D programmable environment — so you lose speed, but get versatility. And these Second Life globes are social — visitors share the same world-state — which in turn opens up interesting possibilities for teaching and science outreach to classrooms. It’s early days yet — and in the meantime, these virtual virtual globes can hold their own purely as works of art that play with our notions of scale and space.

• Thinking inside the box: Not immediately geospatial, but certainly spatial: Behold the awesome levelHead game, by New Zealand’s Julian Oliver:

  
  levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

  (Via 3 Quarks Daily)

• Photosynth to Virtual Earth? Yesterday, we all read the post by Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton that Microsoft’s Photosynth photo geopositioning Live Labs research project had graduated to the Virtual Earth team, the implication being that we would soon see this “productized” inside Virtual Earth.

  But by this morning, the link to the post went dead, and there is no more trace of the news in Chris’s archives. False alarm? Premature anouncement? Was it meant to be a secret?

  Pity, as I was going to build a post around it about how it really is high time that Microsoft expends more resources on making its web services truly standards-based, i.e. platform neutral. Google Earth’s 3D web plugin is just a few months old and is only a month away from getting a Mac version. Virtual Earth 3D has been out for over a year and a half and still has no cross-platform support. Photosynth, should it be heading for mainstream browser support, really also needs to work on the Mac.

  The reason is simple: Developers don’t want to use APIs to build consumer-oriented web services until the results work in a browser irrespective of operating system. Once Mac support arrives for the Google Earth plugin, that’s when its API will enter mainstream use by developers. Microsoft’s geoweb apps are ignoring the Mac minority, which is why they get comparatively less traction.

• Multi-touch spherical display coming: Microsoft will be displaying one at a booth at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2008 to be held this week, according to the floor plan. Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet has more info: It is a multitouch sphere made by Global Imagination, one of a small group of spherical display manufacturers. For a recent overview of spherical displays, check out this Ogle Earth entry from a few months ago.

[Update 14:48 GMT: The YouTube demo is up!:]