The “Every Human Has Rights” campaign aims to raise public awareness of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted 60 years ago this year by the United Nations. Until now, just countries have been signatories. The idea is to get people to read it and sign it too, so that everyone can know their fundamental human rights.

The campaign now has a default layer up on Google Earth. At the top of each placemark you’ll find an outtake from the declaration, and what it means. Below it, bios of some of the many people who have stood up for human rights, often amid great adversity:

Human rights are something that I feel strongly about, so I’m very happy to have been involved in the creation of this layer. (If you hate the design of the placemark popups, you can blame me:-) The layer itself was constructed using an early version of the Google Outreach Spreadsheet Mapper, with help from Google developers.

Content was collected from a range of NGOs supporting the campaign, which is being spearheaded by The Elders and by Realizing Rights.

• Google Earth intelligence blog: Via Ed Parsons, a Google Earth blog focused on military intelligence analysis that I had, unforgivably, not been aware of previously: IMINT & Analysis. It is incredibly thorough. (My only wish — that placemarks be available as KML rather than lists of coordinates.)
• Traditional placename labels: The Native American Coeur d’Alene tribe has been adding traditional place name labels and audio pronunciations to the map. The results are available as KML. The US Federal Geographic Data Committee is supporting the project with grants. (Via Metafilter)
• Orphan finds home village using Google Earth: Sob-story in reverse, in the Times of India. In case you’re wondering where Kiraoli is — Geonames.org has the answer. Check out the Taj Mahal 25km to the east.
• Neogeoweb startup roundup: JotYou — send an sms to someobody, who only receives it if they are in a certain geographic region. Sounds like great game fodder, and good for at least one plot twist in the next Jason Bourne thriller. SpotJots — blogging where location takes precedence (and which would benefit from KML output.) (Both via Renalid)

The New York Times gets its own layer in Google Earth. The content is top-notch and updated every 15 minutes, but the georeferencing creates the same problems that other attempts have faced: Users of Google Earth are in the habit of assuming that placemarks mark the spot precisely, to the limit of the resolution — otherwise, Google Earth is overkill. Instead, NYT content is categorized by neighborhood, city, state, country or even region, and as a result you get placemarks that mark the middle of nowhere:

One thing that is new and clever is how the NYT has dealt with stories that belong to multiple categories:

Still, not until articles are location-tagged manually by the reporter using Google Earth will we get something that feels right every time. In the Sudan story above, we should be able to peer at the roof of the orphanage. In other cases, it might make sense to add migration routes, disputed borders, warzone front lines, multiple placemarks, georeferenced photos, map overlays and/or no-go zones, and have all these linked to from the artlcle — and vice versa.

The list of recently updated imagery for Google Earth is above all a feast of developing-world content. Here is an entirely subjective mini appetizer:

The whole of Southern Africa is now at 2.5m resolution! Which means it is time to revisit that wonderful Namibia photo layer, and also the global shipwreck layer.

The little-known but spectacular Simien Mountains National Park, very much the highlight of a recent trip to Ethiopia, now gets a new tranche of DigitalGlobe imagery (near Debark). It’s over here — turn on the Panoramio layer to see some very cool photos in the vicinity.

Syria gets some new content too — a tile that includes the site targeted by Israel’s air raid last September, but also the walls of the old Roman frontier fortress of Halabiya:

Further south along the Euphrates, the important site of Dura Europos is now in high resolution — an important Roman city with remarkably preserved frescoes.

That’s just really a minuscule part of the update: Chile, North Korea, New South Wales, Western Australia all get 2.5m updates across all or large parts of their territory, for starters… The complete list is below the fold.

Continue reading Google Earth imagery update: An appetizer →

• Seero gets KML: Live georeferenced video community site Seero gets the promised KML feeds! Craig Stanton’s previously blogged videos of his trip up the Pacific Crest Trail truly shine in Google Earth. But as a bonus, you can also see him start his walk across Japan.
• Viewfinder: Yes, you can already place a photo in Google Earth so that it matches the view exactly. But have you tried it? It’s hard. Some researchers at the University of Southern California are working on “Viewfinder”, a system to make it idiot-proof, and have a Google research grant to find out how. Here is their report. Here is the NYT’s article on them.
• 3D KML chips: Interesting idea: Have your 3D chip design application output models of your designs as KML files, so that anyone can fly around them in Google Earth, which everyone has by now, right?
• WordPress + Virtual Earth: A WordPress plugin that lets you show Virtual Earth maps with any blog post, including bird’s eye view (and 3D if you run Windows).
• ArcGIS Office: Check it out: ArcGIS Explorer 600 is going to look like Microsoft Office. Could somebody please build a virtual globe application that looks as good as Apple’s Aperture for Mac?
• LoadMyTracks: My GPS to Mac utility of choice, LoadMyTracks, gets an update to version 1.1 (052) adding new supported models.
• Wilkins 2.0: Richard Treves improves my Wilkins KML overlay, making some good points in the process.

Today came the announcement that in a few weeks the free Second Life client (Mac, Linux, PC) will add native support for 3DConnexion’s SpaceNavigator device for navigation and object manipulation. I’ve had a pre-release version of the software to play with for the past couple of days. The improvement of the user experience is on par with how it felt to first use the SpaceNavigator on Google Earth — i.e. it’s a revelation.

That’s good news. All of us who work with Second Life know that the program could well use a more intuitive user experience — the relatively steep learning curve is currently the program’s biggest impediment to becoming a mainstream global client for virtual world-based tasks.

What interesting is that there are in fact three modes for using SpaceNavigator in Second Life, each one useful for a specific task. I’ll call them:

• “Second Life mode” — You act on the avatar with the device.
• “Google Earth mode” — You leave your avatar behind and navigate a sim as if it were a close-up view of Google Earth.
• “SketchUp mode” — when building, you manipulate the object you have selected, much as with a CAD program.

The fact that all these modes make sense at one point or another in your Second Life session points to the extraordinary versatility of the program. The challenge has been to not smother people with Second Life’s complexity. The SpaceNavigator cuts through the clutter by making the most important parts — movement & navigation — completely intuitive. That said, I think that the main people buying a SpaceNavigator for Second Life are going to be the hard core master builders rather than the casual surfer.

Here is a video of the SpaceNavigator being demonstrated in Second Life:

And lest you think that this post is off topic…

• Darb Dabney runs a blog about using virtual worlds to do GIS: Darb Dabney’s SIMGIS Blog.
• Digital Urban keeps on playing with interesting urban geospatial projects in Second Life.
• Hey! The 3D Second Life client is coming to Samsung telephones! If it is that easy, can a Google Earth client be far behind?:-)

A couple of new layers are up on Google Earth today.

Greenpeace: One is a new Greenpeace layer showing those places that environmental organization is active. Google Earth Blog has this one covered. [Update: Official announcement by Greenpeace]

UNICEF: Another is a new UNICEF layer showing off its projects. It comes with an innovate new hack: tab functionality inside the placemark popup. Okay, it just looks like a tab — I think what is going on is that there are two placemarks at the same location, and that the “tab” links refer to each placemark’s popup in turn. The hack is that one placemark has no visible icon, so you don’t have choose between closely spaced placemarks when you click on an icon. Check it out — you’ll see what I mean. Very clever.

World is Witness: And then there is a layer for World is Witness, a major new effort by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Google Earth layer accompanies the geoblog of the same name, and which tells georeferenced stories of people facing the threat of genocide and other crimes against humanity, primarily in Africa.

Inspiration definitely came from the Gombe Chimp Blog, but Michael Graham, one of the driving forces behind the USHMM Darfur Crisis layer, pushed World is Witness to become something that can aggregate all sort of media into a georeferenced post: text, photos, podcasts, video and even KML files attached to posts, pinpointing places or routes mentioned in an article. This makes the blog a very versatile tool for getting news out quickly about changing events on the ground, using every media that a modern-day field reporter might have at their disposal to make reportage much more immediate and nuanced for the reader — not just on the web but automatically for Google Earth too. No tropes here. (Disclosure: I was marginally involved in the discussions that produced this geoblog.) (Update 2008-04-07: Official announcement)

The official announcements should have more info. I will link to them as they appear.