Mark Mulligan, Reader in Physical Geography ay King’s College London and prolific KML content creator, is at it again. On the occasion of Earth Day, King’s is launching HealthyPlanet.org, which lets “individuals and companies sponsor areas of protected parks throughout the world, choosing from more than 70,000 different parks or heritage sites in danger.”

The site won’t be fully functional until the end of week, but Earth Day won’t wait:-). By the end of the week, however, you’ll be able to use Google Earth/Maps to find and “claim” plots of protected parklands around the world by donating to Healthy Planet, a new charity set up in association with the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC). Proceeds go to conservation projects.

Until then, you can read the press release; if you visit the site today you will find it in preview mode — no adopting of park lands yet.

Blogging can take a long time when you’re on a Parisian terrace café distracted by the locals on a springtime weekend. As they say, Ceçi n’est pas un geoblogue:

• Street View coming to Europe (and more): Google Street VIew cars are spotted in Milan. Digital Earth blog points us to some really interesting intel on what the cars are carrying — lasers, which allow a true 3D model of the surroundings to be made. Paste a series of panorama photos onto this model, and suddenly we have ourselves the holy grail of 3D city recreations — one where you can “step out” of the Street View locations and roam at will.
• Autotechnogeoglyphics: Pruned enlarges my vocabulary with a word every aerial imagery aficionado should know.
• New Google Earth-based high-school lesson: “A Management Plan for Stonehenge: Real-world decision making” by Juicy Geography‘s Noel Jenkins.
• “Google uncovers hidden Pilbara find”: So sez the Australian. It could also have been found with an ESRI tool, but I think the point is that it was found with Google Earth instead.
• Google Sky content: Google Earth Blog notes some new default layers in Google Sky, featuring video tours of astronomical objects. (More about the Celestron tie-in here.)
• What’s in a name? Mikel Maron on OpenStreetMap’s first naming war, over Cyprus.
• KML and HTML, cont.: Google Earth’s Michael Jones chimes in on his “KML is the HTML of geographic content” analogy that spawned a long comment stream on James Fee’s blog.
• Google YouTube fest: Seven how-to YouTube videos by geoGooglers, including some on KML.
• Search via visual landscape queries? It sounds too good to be true, but some Android developers are working on an app that will let you point the camera at an urban horizon and get information back about what you see.
• Australian models: ZNO Blog has recently come out of hibernation; just in time to tell us about a collection of Australian architectural models in Google Earth, courtesy of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
• GPS Camera: Altek announces a digital point-and-shoot with built-in GPS, to be released in the second half of 2008. (Alternatively, how about a GPS device with a camera?) (Thanks Jonathan!)
• Mapping Congo jungle villages: The BBC reports on the Rainforest Foundation‘s efforts to map remote villages in the Congo.

Earlier this week, Peter Batty released whereyougonnabe (beta), a Facebook application that lets you expose your planned whereabouts to friends, and which lets you follow friends, so you’ll never have a near miss again.

In terms of functionality, it competes most closely with Dopplr, a standalone application with a Facebook module that has the same objective.

I already use Dopplr on Facebook, so it was easy to make a comparison. The upshot: Dopplr is simpler to use, while whereyougonnabe is more full-featured. Which you end up using will depend on your needs (and those of your friends).

In Dopplr, it takes no time at all to add a new “trip”. Just type a city, which gets recognized on the fly, click on start- and end dates, and you’re set. It is simplicity itself.

whereyougonnabe takes longer, but you have more options: Instead of just cities you can define addresses were you’ll be, instead of just dates you can define times, and you can specify the probability of the trip taking place. But you are forced to say what you will be doing there (you have no choice), so I wish it would have “travelling” as a default rather than throw a spanner in the submission process if I leave the field empty.

Dopplr and whereyougonnabe have different strategies when it comes to how you expose your future whereabouts. whereyougonnabe is a Facebook application, so your possible audience is your Facebook friends, all Facebook users, or just you (where you are told of serendipities but others are not). With Dopplr, you choose which other individual Dopplr users can see your trips — and if you install the Facebook module, then so can all your friends.

Where whereyougonnabe truly shines is what it does with the information. Dopplr uses the information of its users to generate a mini newsfeed of who is where — it doesn’t really leverage this information in geospatially interesting ways. whereyougonnabe, on the other hand, is literally all over the map: You can get a view on Google Maps with icons for where your friends will be, and the pièce the resistance is a timeline-enabled KML network link that draws your route and those of your friends, and keeps it updated.

whereyougonnabe’s visual representations work really well for me. To be honest, so does Dopplr’s simple newsfeed, as I am generally able to figure out myself that if somebody is in Ottawa and I am in Paris, that we’re unlikely to meet up. Dopplr’s RSS and iCal feed output is also very handy and fits into my exisiting schemes of keeping tabs on friends (Dopplr’s feed in purple below):

Where I find whereyougonnabe gets a bit heavy is when it squeezes the geosocial graph for every last bit of info and for every friend: It’s too much effort to read for every user, for example, that:

[xxxxx] will be working at Health Canada, 70 Colombine Drwy, Ottawa, ON, Canada from 7:45 AM to 4:00 PM on Tue. You will be 3516 miles away, meeting at Centre Culturel SuÔøΩdois, Rue Payenne, 75003 3ÔøΩme Arrondissement, Paris, France from Sat to Wed

I’d rather be alerted by proximity alerts than by a wall of text in which the meeting possibilities are hidden. The visual representations on maps and as KML cut through the clutter, but here too it would be cool to highlight close encounters via some kind of color code. At the moment, the home screen has a lot of clutter, which works against usability — Dopplr, on the other hand, subscribes to the “less is more” philosophy, which works well for me.

whereyougonnabe’s home page.

But Dopplr has recently also cashed in on an advertising agreement with an outfit called Mr & Mrs. Smith, and of late my every interaction with Dopplr includes some kind of exposure to luxury boutique hotels of the kind that I would never contemplate staying at at my travel destination. It’s an intrusive case of misdirected advertising, and as such comprises a sudden and rather strong pollutant of the experience. whereyougonnabe’s Google ads are far less intrusive, and very sustainable (at least to me).

Some more small stuff: I use kilometers as a measure of distance, not miles, and would like a setting to change that. In any case, precise as-the-bird-flies distances are not very meaningful, I feel. (And a beta bug report: accented characters need fixing:-)

Dopplr doesn’t lock itself into Facebook, but is independent of it, which is a good thing. I’m only using Facebook until something better comes along, and because I’ve been developing some mini apps for my employer, the Swedish Institute (Swedish Word of the Day, anyone?) to better understand the platform. Going forward, we at SI are commissioning a web application that is separate from Facebook, but which outputs via modules to all sorts of current and future formats and platforms, including Facebook, Flash widgets, RSS, email, iPhone… If a new platform reaches critical mass, we’ll have a new module built. I think this is going to be the ubiquitous development model for the next few years. Fortunately Batty knows this:

Our application currently runs on the Facebook Platform. The big advantage of this is that you don’t need to re-enter your network of friends, you can just leverage the existing social graph that you have in Facebook. In future we will support other social and business networking systems – LinkedIn is an obvious target for the business traveler, and of course OpenSocial is on our list too.

I think that in the long run it makes sense to be platform agnostic on this.

In sum, I very much like whereyougonnabe, though I suspect its biggest enemy is going to be my laziness, and that of my friends. If it can simplify the interface, shorten the input process and perhaps offer an XML output option, then the superior map visualization features will make it a winner.

Frank at Google Earth Blog is already doing an excellent job looking at and explaining the new features of Google Earth, and so is Google Lat-Long blog, so no need for duplicate posting here. What you’ll find instead is some more esoteric observations, ranging from the philosophical to the mundane.

The philosophical:

It occurs to me that the individual improvements that comprise this latest revamp fall into two categories — let’s call them brains and beauty. I get a lot more excited about the improvements to the brains of Google Earth, though I realize that it’s beauty wich turns heads, and which people “want” (or “cling” to ;-).

How to define those two categories? Brainy improvements improve the quality of the information that Google Earth delivers, or improve the efficiency of access to existing information — they improve the function of Google Earth as an atlas. Beauty improvements, on the other hand, improve the function of Google Earth as a plausible mirror world, an ever-more accurate simulacrum of Earth.

Atlas or mirror world, what’s the difference? Their functions are in fact poles apart. Atlases filter out as much as possible that which is not information or which obscures information. Mirror worlds, on the other hand, aim for the accents and details that provide a sheen of reality — precisely that which atlases strip off in the pursuit of clarity. Atlases try to augment reality by pushing high-information content to the fore. Mirror worlds do not.

These two functions can conflict if they exist in one application, and indeed I feel Google Earth is acquiring something of a split personality with this release. I’m not really complaining; you can turn off many of the improvements that are propelling Google Earth to its mirror-world destiny, but it is still the case that resources are being expended by the team on making Google Earth pretty, sometimes even at the expense of clarity.

I’ll explain, but I’ll start by categorizing the most recent release’s improvements into brains and beauty:

Brains:

Revamped navigation controls

easily viewable acquisition dates

Street View in Google Earth

12 new languages

Flash support for Mac

Beauty:

More and better buildings

New sunlight control

New atmosphere

I think most of the brainy improvements are uncontroversially brainy, but why do I regard the new buildings and the new sunlight controls as cosmetic? Let’s take each in turn:

More and better buildings: It’s true that the rendering of 3D buildings is now much more efficient, and that there are a lot more of them, but why doesn’t this constitute a huge informational boost? Because the satellite imagery already tells us there are buildings in those places; there is precious little else added by a 3D representation without metadata such as: Are the buildings residential, office, factory? Who owns them, when were they built, how high, who built them, how much was paid for them, what businesses are inside? Do they have websites, do they deliver?

A lot of this no doubt will arrive down the line, but until then, the buildings are pretty rather than informationally dense.

New sunlight control: When NASA World Wind got a feature just like this last year, I remember biting my tongue lest my critique be seen as partisan, but I did not really regard that functionality to be something that increased the informational quotient of World Wind much; I feel the same criticism now holds for the implementation in Google Earth.

The sunlight control is useful in one specific way — to see where on Earth it is night and day at a specific hour. But when it comes to lighting landscapes and buildings at sunrise or sunset, I don’t see the value besides eye-candy appeal.

First of all, the sunlight control is a bit of a misnomer. We’re not actually seeing the effect of sunlight: Buildings and mountain peaks do not generate actual shadows on neighbors when the sun hangs low on the horizon. Instead, we get shading as an inverse function of how much a surface faces a light source we’ll call the Sun.

Shouldn’t I be happy that Google Earth isn’t going all out for realistic shadows but instead is giving us a shading tool, which we can use to tease out terrain features? I would be if the light source were movable to ad hoc locations other than where the sun can be — for example, if I could make it revolve around the sky at 10 degrees above the horizon at locations other than the North Pole currently, I’d be happy, indeed. (Do go to the North Pole and try it, though. I really works, there.)

What I’m trying to say is that the current implementation falls between two chairs. It’s not quite accurate in terms of mirror worldliness, but is still limited in scope by its mirror-world aspirations.

New atmosphere: One place where I know I disagree with Google Earth Blog’s Frank Taylor is that I like to be able to see the little rectangular strips of high resolution imagery across the face of Google Earth when zoomed out, whereas Frank would prefer the look to be seamless and realistic, and prefers the zoomed out Google Earth to look just like the real thing.

For me, however, those rectangular strips represent information. They promise a lot more information if I zoom in on them, and also hint that there’s something there worth taking a high-resolution image of. I feel that this kind of information should trump a realistic view of Earth. And while the new atmospheric look certainly helps with the realism, it filters out too much of the kind of detail that I feel makes Google Earth useful when zoomed out. Yes, you can turn it off, but it’s turned on by default. I feel version 4.2’s atmosphere had a much better information/realism balance.

Priorities:

So what would I have prioritized instead of buildings, sunlight and a thicker atmosphere? Well: A projection that is friendly towards the poles; 3D bathymetry; better tour creation support; GeoRSS support; better search filters. These functions would all tilt Google Earth back towards the atlas end of the spectrum. Of course, that’s not necessarily where the money is. Google Earth is ad-supported, and nobody searches for pizza at the poles or in the Mariana Trench. And when Microsoft Virtual Earth does things like add lots of new buildings and everyone applauds, it’s hard not to want to compete. But that’s okay; in the end I much prefer a free mirror world with atlas functions than nothing at all.

That’s all the philosophy I can muster tonight. Now for the mundane stuff.

The mundane stuff:

Bear in mind that this latest version is still beta, so some stuff doesn’t work well. On the Mac, I’ve found the keyboard controls to sometimes lock up, even on a new install on a new account. If you’re using GE for a must-succeed presentation, best to stick to what you know works.

Another reason to ease into the new version is that the keyboard controls have changed. [On the Mac,] Command + up-arrow or down-arrow previously let you zoom in and out, but have now been mapped to the new look-around control. Zooming is now linked to the function + arrows combo. It takes some getting used to, unless of course you use the on-screen controls or a SpaceNavigator.

There’s one new preference item: You can turn off the new auto tilting feature that you get by default as you zoom in by right-clicking and drag the mouse up/down or using the on-screen controls.

Another subtle change: You can no longer filter the default layers by Core/All/Active layers only. Considering that it was a little-used feature that could generate confusion, this simplification of the UI is welcome.

One thing I think is a bit of a loss: No longer do we get a precise percent figure in the status bar showing how far along the download of current view’s imagery is. Now it’s a growing circular arc that slowly grows into a completed circle. Frustratingly, the arc sometimes gets smaller!

Turn on layers or placemarks in Google Earth, switch to Google Sky and you still get to see that content, floating among the stars. Surely this bug can’t be that hard to fix?

Small gripes, really. To be honest, I’m having way too much fun watching and waiting for the next move in the Iran-Google war of wills. It sure helps that Google has little or no business interests Iran, and that it still has a lovely concession up its sleeve: Offering to make a localized Farsi version that omits the Arabian Gulf reference, in accordance with their “primary, common local” doctrine. (Just don’t call Farsi Farsi:-)

I have been (and still am) traveling, so have had to peck at the news in a busy news week. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve had to give short shrift recently (fortunately others have not):

• Google Earth 4.3 coming online: Download it now. While you’re waiting, read Google Earth Blog’s first impressions.
• Landprint.com: Order your own 3D custom-made prints of bits of the planet. $50 + shipping gets you 6×6 inches of a 3D relief-map. By a developer of NASA World Wind. Very clever.
• Satellites over Iran: UK’s The Times has a story about a purported Iranian long-range missile factory. With photos. A blogger goes looking for the spot in Google Earth and makes the before/after analyisis.
• Virtual Earth 6.1 released: Microsoft has revamped its map and virtual globe offering, to general acclaim. Digital Earth Blog likes the trees and overpasses. James Fee notes that Mac Safari web browser support means Virtual Earth is now in play for more projects with tough browser compatibility requirements. Mapperz shows how you can overlay ESRI Shapefile data in Virtual Earth. Leave it to me to point out there is still no Mac support for the 3D component, which makes the clickable but useless “3D” button that is prominent on Mac browsers doubly irritating.
• KML accepted by OGC as a standard: Google Lat-Long breaks the news. Upshot: Broader adoption, slower development, and not a surprise. Matt Giger doesn’t like the part about the slower development, while some GIS pros scoff at the idea of KML as the geospatial HTML. The Daily ACK muses on making KML a standard for the visual display of astronomical data as well.

Here’s a further sign of the slowly shifting power balance, away from nation-states to non-state actors: Iran’s foreign ministry has now taken it upon itself to censure Google Earth’s use of the term “Arabian Gulf” alongside “Persian Gulf”:

“Raising such issues about a historically-documented and undeniable term is illegal,” [foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali] Hosseini told the Mehr News Agency.

The Islamic Iran Participation Party also condemned the move, saying it will raise suspicion that Google Earth managers and experts are “knowingly or unknowingly” following certain power’s efforts to provoke conflict in the Persian Gulf region.

In a declaration released on Monday, the party described the action as insulting the intelligence of the international community.

This is undoubtedly the next volley in this escalating war of wills, after Google posted its “primary, common, local” naming doctrine to its public policy blog. Without mentioning that particular gulf, the doctrine spells out precisely why the term “Arabian Gulf” isn’t going to be removed anytime soon: It’s the primary common local name for the Gulf in several countries bordering it.

It’s midnight in Mountain View, so the embargo’s over: There’s a new version of Google Earth coming out today, Google Earth 4.3, though it won’t actually hit Google’s download servers until 8pm local time (00:01 03:00 UTC Wednesday morning.) In the meantime, briefly, here’s what to expect, as recounted by Google Earth product manager Peter Birch:

Revamped navigation: New users should find it much easier to get around Google Earth. Zoom in and the view automatically tilts to horizontal, and there is a new look-around control. (Also, relative height is now used to determine movement speed, not absolute height.)

Images get easily viewable acquisition dates: Move the pointer over a piece of high resolution imagery, see the acquisition date at the bottom of the screen.

More and better buildings: 3D rendering has been rethought — low res versions of textures download first, followed by higher res (which is more like how Microsoft Virtual Earth does it, from the sound of it). There’s whole new towns available by default, and many more Google Earth Warehouse buildings.

Flash support for Mac: Finally, we once again have feature parity for Windows and Mac versions. This means YouTube videos are now viewable in Mac version of Google Earth. Yay!

Street View comes to Google Earth.

New sunlight control: When turned on, see where it is day and night on Earth, using the time slider. Zoomed in, watch the sun rise or set over the landscape. (There will likely be comparisons made to this feature in NASA World Wind, not least by World Wind developers themselves :-)

12 new languages: Google Earth will now also be available in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian (isn’t that just a Swedish dialect? :-), English(UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Portuguese(PT), Romanian, Thai, and Turkish.

What’s “missing” from this release? Of the most requested features, there will not (yet?) be revamped support for tours, no new pole-friendly projection, no 3D bathymetry and no GeoRSS support. Google Earth joins Microsoft’s Virtual Earth in getting a revamp, so perhaps it’s high time for a head-to-head review…