• Submillimeter astronomy as KML: Yet more astronomy content gets the KML treatment, making it usable in Google Sky. Orbiting Frog has assembled a layer collecting astronomical objects that are radiant at sub-millimeter wavelengths, and has just made it available for all to download, “thanks to help from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC), the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC) and my colleagues at Cardiff University.” Eye candy is available over at Flickr. There is plenty here to explore.
• Barcelona censored: The Spanish-language Google Earth blog notices that with the latest update, bits of Barcelona are now censored. What gives?

  It’s the usual story. Satellite imagery got replaced by higher-resolution aerial photography, this time by the region’s Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya (as per the credits). You can still see the old imagery in Google Maps here for a while longer, until Maps gets the update.

  Before:
  

  After:
  

  Catalonia’s governmental GIS office gets to censor those bits it wants to of aerial photography. (Satellite imagery, on the other hand, is beyond its jurisdiction.) At least the censorship is obvious, as opposed to camouflaged. (Entire update is listed below the fold for archival purposes.)

• iPhotoToGoogleEarth 2: Version 2.0 of the free iPhotoToGoogleEarth iPhoto export plugin is out, writes Craig Stanton. It works with iPhoto’08 in the latest version of iLife.
• Automator actions for Google Earth: Got Mac? Alasdair Allan has written two Automator actions for Applescript to switch from Earth to Sky, and back again. (Why not use in conjunction with the Google Earth Action Pack and/or GPS Automator actions…)
• GEMMO: Google Earth Hacks‘ Mickey Mellen is coming out with yet another Google Earth-based game, Google Earth MMO, now in a private beta. The cool bit? “All gameplay (including battles, shops, messaging, etc) is done completely in Google Earth with no add-on software or web browser calls required.” More here.
• Ads for online map makers (like you): You get the most of the money for ads showing on your websites, so why shouldn’t you also get money for ads on the maps you created? That’s the thinking behind one of the new features of Map Channels, which now lets you create your own Google Maps-based maps + content and then add ads using Lat 49’s “mapvertising”. The latest upgrade to Map Channels also improves KML support.
• Feature extraction from imagery: Awesome: Satellite imagery provider Spot Image is offering free imagery to researchers to help develop automated feature extraction tools that can then be used by the likes of GeoNames to offer more tan just point-based name tags. Writes GeoNames’ Marc Wick:
  

  Features that we think can be extracted from 2.5m imagery are city contours, airports, streets, shore lines, lakes, rivers and others. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and student-works to find algorithms for feature identification and extraction. Drop me a line for more details if you are doing research in this area and would like to work on this challenging task.

  […] It will be a gigantic step forward for the availability, quality and coverage of free geographical data on global scale.

• GeoServer: GeoServer 1.6.0 is out, and among other things it features “improved connectivity to Google Maps/Virtual Earth/Yahoo! Maps, leveraging better integration with OpenLayers as well as bug fixes for our Google Earth support.”
• GPS to Illustrator? A reader asks a question that I don’t know the answer to: He’s “searching for Mac software that converts [GPS] tracks to vectors (to be used in Illustrator). I was as wondering if you could steer me in the right direction? If no mac software exists, are there Windows ones?.”
• GeoLily! Who needs geocoding when you have geoLily?
• Microsoft Sky: Microsoft’s answer to Google Sky, WorldWide Telescope, looks set to be launched on February 27.
• 360Cities update: Jeffrey Martin writes: “You might be interested to know that 360cities.net has had a facelift to its homepage. We’ve also added about 20 cities… Including few excellent places such as Kolkata :-)”
• Star Wars! The rogue spy satellite has been shot down. Alan Clegg has a post linking to a KML overlay that shows you where and how it happened.

  

• How To Get On Google Maps Without An Address: Short answer: Get a PO Box.
• Super delegates: Democratic superdelegates, mapped as a KML file. The Official Google Blog has more.
• HeyWhatsThat Cosmic Visibility: Listed here better late than never, this cool Google Maps-based tool lets you visualize night sky events such as yesterday’s lunar eclipse. There’s added functionality for the Moon and Mars too.
• Traffic sensor web: Back in 2006, this was a high-end experimental feature for Honda drivers in Japan; now Nokia is busy democratizing the technology — where you GPS phone acts as a node in a traffic sensor web, relaying driving speeds to a central processor, and benefiting from live congestion information gathered from others GPS phones. It’s such a good idea that it is just a matter of time before we take it for granted.
• New Blog: There’s a new blog on the block: Where On Google Earth? posts a screen grab from Google Earth and then lets users guess where its from. Winners get bragging rights.

Continue reading Links: submillimeter KML, Barcelona update censors, iPhotoToGoogleEarth 2 →

I love the smell of demonstrably frivolous lawsuits in the morning. Somebody called Jonathan Cobb has just filed one (PDF version) in Atlanta, Georgia asking for $25 million because, he alleges, Google stole his idea for Google Sky. Specifically:

12. Plaintiff shows that, beginning in 2006, as a contractor working in Georgia through WorkforceLogic USA, Plaintiff convened a Google internal e-mail discussion group, denominated googlesky(a)googlegroups.com, in which Plaintiff presented, advanced and refined the Google Sky concept and idea. When Plaintiff formed the e-mail discussion group, he listed as members of the group certain employees of Defendant Google who had managerial and operational responsibility for Google Earth and related programs.

And what did Cobb’s Sky comprise of?

13. Among the features presented and proposed by Plaintiff for Google Sky were the following:

(a) An interface similar to that of Google Earth with upgrades, including the presentation of a DayandNight view and related space imagery;

(b) An interface with differing telescope control systems;

(c) Access to and the ability to use GPS devices for positioning information ;

(d) Object tracking;

(e) Forecasting;

(f) The ability to subscribe to high resolution imagery from earth and space-based telescopes;

(g) Live image overlay and recording ability; and

(h) Optical modulation measurement.

The main problem for Cobb is not that the idea of Google Sky was an obvious one. It was definitely an idea that was “in the air” as soon as Google Earth was released — the notion of applying Google Earth’s superior visualization tools to datasets other than Earth (Moon, Mars, the sky) was an obvious next extension of Google Earth. The hard bit, then, was not so much having the idea as being in a position to make it happen.

No, the main problem for Cobb is that he is demonstrably not first person to have proposed and suggested the idea.

Cobb’s lawsuit says that sometime in 2006 (“beginning in 2006”), he convened a Google group that had some Google Earth team members as subscribers in which he would eventually come to pitch his idea for Google Sky. But on February 25, 2006, Ogle Earth carried a post entitled Mooting Google Sky. It began like this:

Alberto Conti, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Center in Baltimore, writes on his blog about the potential for using the technology behind Google Earth to help visualize the wealth of astronomical information that’s available but not easily accessible, currently.

Alberto’s writes that he suggested “Google Sky” to John Hanke when they met a few weeks ago, and that he will be getting in touch with Google Earth VP of engineering Brian McClendon in the next few days to organize to set up a visit to STSC for some brainstorming. Ah, the combined wonders of blogging and search — Brian, you can head on over to Alberto’s blog now and preview his pitch:-)

How did I find Alberto’s post? I subscribe to searches (including Google blog searches) for certain terms that are delivered to me as RSS feeds. Alberto’s post showed up because he used Google’s Blogger publishing tool. What happened next? I got an email from Brian asking (not demanding) that I take down the post because “Google doesn’t really like to get publicity about things before they happen”. Brian had also talked to Alberto, who had taken down his post (hence the dead link in the above text snippet). I replied that as a courtesy to Alberto (who thought the blog was private as it had no links out) I would be willing to remove reporting of his pitch to Google but that I would mention in the replacement text that the removal of the contents of a post titled “Mooting Google Sky” came at the request of Google. As a result, the post was not changed. Lucky!

Fast forward to August 2007, when the Google Sky feature in Google Earth went live with version 4.2. Blogging the event was one Alberto Conti, whom it turns out had remained involved in the collaboration between Google and the Space Telescope Science Center to ultimately produce the Google Sky. Alberto’s blog post documents an email exchange between him, John Hanke and Brian beginning February 7, 2006, to stake the claim that it was Alberto’s idea.

Whether or not you think publishing private email correspondence on a public blog is proper netiquette, it does show that the pitch that Google ended acting on was made starting early February 2006. This does not mean that Google had not thought about a Sky feature earlier than then, but it does prove that the project to make Google Sky began no later.

(Via InformationWeek. CNET also has an article, which additionally quotes an internet law expert.)

[PS – I realize there is a whole list of blogging to do items for another links post, but alas I must travel to Luxor for a few days now. Back Tuesday.]

It’s been a year since a user-created placemark on Google Earth Community generated controversy for alleged bias by Google in matters Israel/Palestine, so I guess it is time to repeat history.

A quick reminder of what came before: In August 2006, somebody identifying himself as Simon David uploaded a georeferenced list of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, with commentary, to Google Earth Community. In January 2007, the content, part of the default Google Earth Community layer (and which can be turned on in the Layers pane) led to a stroppy article on TotallyJewish.com that accused Google of anti-Israel bias for allowing commentary it did not like to be visible on Google Earth. It was a silly accusation, and the reasons why were explained on Ogle Earth then. (The response was a defence of free speech: If you encounter speech you don’t like, you should add speech you do like rather than attempt to squash it.)

What’s the current media frenzy about? Again, we have a layer uploaded to Google Earth Community ages ago (in December 2006); it purports to show Arab villages in Israel that were ethnically cleansed as a result of the war between Israel and several Arab countries soon after Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948. The uploader is Thameen Darby, who runs the website Palestine Remembered, which seeks to document what Palestinians call Nakba, “the catastrophe”. Darby makes no secret of his views and allegiance to the Palestinian cause.

What’s new this time? Israel on Blog was the first to hit my radar screen with the story, and sums it up well: City officials in Kiryat Yam, a small Israeli town north of Haifa, are suing Google for slander because a marker in Thameen Darby’s collection places the town of Arab Ghawarina — which Darby alleges was evacuated and destroyed in 1948 — at the location of present-day Kiryat Yam. The Associated Press quotes an Israeli historian supporting Kiryat Yam’s claim that there was no prior Arab settlement there.

“That’s simply complete nonsense,” Professor Yossi Ben-Artzi of Haifa University told Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot. “Kiryat Yam was built on sand dunes, and there wasn’t any Palestinian village in the area. The lands were bought in 1939 by the Gav Yam construction company.”

The AP article also quotes Thameen Darby:

“As far as I can know, the Arab Ghawarina locality was in the place depicted,” Darby told The Associated Press. He noted that he may have not marked the exact location and if proven wrong “by reliable sources, I will be quick to reallocate it.”

Darby’s Internet Web site pinpoints Ghawarina on the site of Kiryat Yam, but another places it south of Haifa at the site of a present-day Arab town, Jisr el-Zarka.

This reporting raises some interesting questions. Did the town of Kiryat Yam make a good-faith effort to reach Darby to correct the location before deciding to sue Google, or is the town making a point of holding Google responsible for the content? Surely the historical location of a town is an easy matter for historians to be in agreement of, even in this region? If so, this whole tempest in a teacup could presumably be resolved quite easily.

Is any of this Google’s responsibility? It’s not the first time that user-generated content has caused a government actor to get cross with Google. In 2006, a user posted the “secret” locations of Norwegian fighter jets to the Google Earth Community, prompting an army spokesman to threaten legal activity, though nothing came of it.

Google’s response to this latest geofracas, after NetworkWorld asked, is:

While we recognize that some may find the user generated content objectionable, we are careful to balance the integrity of an open forum with the legal requirements of local governments. It looks as though this particular user-contributed annotation does not breach our Terms and Conditions nor is it in any way illegal.

The Google Earth community layer is a place where people can tag their knowledge or opinions of a location. Their comments are clearly indicated with the ‘I’ icon and this layer can easily be switched on and off.

We believe the majority of people use the community positively to share their expertise and experiences. In most cases, our users increase the utility of the product and provide a more meaningful and robust experience for each other with their contributions to the Google Earth community.

Reading between the lines, it appears that Google is willing to take a measure of legal responsibility for the contents of the Google Earth Community, but that it sees no evidence in this case that Thameen Darby’s possible mis-placement of the town Arab Ghawarina was intentional. In most democracies, a falsehood has to be intentional for accusations of slander to hold up in court. If this reading is correct, then Darby would have to change the location if it turns out he was wrong, or else Kiryat Yam could have a case in Israeli courts of law against Google, the publisher ultimately responsible for the layer.

This is the problem with a big multinational running a community site such as Google Earth Community or YouTube, as opposed to just individuals posting to the commons that is the web. Governments and legal systems can and do make demands that web content they disapprove of be removed; but if I post something to my server in the US, I can ignore what Turkey or Thailand thinks of my views. If the publisher is Google, however, Google’s local business interests are assets that are liable to be targeted. Such tactics have already worked with YouTube: See Turkey and Thailand. There is nothing that keeps an Israeli court from collecting damages from Google in Israel if it decides that Google Earth Community violates Israeli law. What’s Google going to do, withdraw from Israel altogether? Unlikely.

Does this mean that Google will police Google Earth Community in the future? That sounds unworkable. Instead, I’m guessing that such conflicts will be resolved in an ad hoc manner, depending on how much media upheaval is generated and whether there are concrete legal challenges that Google can’t ignore.

Once again we are reminded of the importance people attach to the “public space” that is Google Earth, regarding it as a kind of de facto reference atlas for the world.

(See also Lies, damned lies, and Jerusalem’s borders)

In Australia, The Age reports how Dr. Chris Simpson, a coral reef specialist who “was exploring the Kimberleys through Google Earth, a practice he has incorporated into his job [ha!]” has discovered extensive new formations of rare fringing coral reefs on remote parts of the Western Australian coast.

The article has a good read, with pictures that provide some visual clues as to where these areas are:

Buccaneer Archipelago:

View Larger Map

Cape Bougainville:

View Larger Map

Some points:

1. Are those some gorgeous beaches around there or what?
2. Why didn’t The Age just do us all a favor and link to these locations in Google Maps? Some newspapers are still not using neogeo tools that are practically mainstream by now.
3. The democratization of access to satellite imagery continues to produce the kinds of discoveries we hope for. Other ones making use of huge regions of freely available high resolution include the discovery of an ancient Roman villa, archaeological sites in France and Egypt and meteorite craters.

• OMG!: My Nokia N95 can do tilting 3D maps and textured 3D buildings, thanks to a company called Carmenta:

  If they can do it, where is the mobile version of Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth? Coming soon I hope. (Via the excellent Mapperz)

• Google My Maps to Virtual Earth: Got content in a Google My Maps but want to see it on top of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth imagery? Chris Ring has just written My Maps in Virtual Earth, and posted about it on his blog.
• GPS2Flickr via Ipoki: Ipoki (previously blogged here) is another contender in the “live position updating to a web gadget via your GPS-enabled mobile phone” space. It’s now got a newly added function, currently in a closed beta (email Ipoki to be included) that lets you send your GPS location live and then later, via their website, georeference your Flickr photos with the track automatically. The cool thing is that the photos don’t need to have been taken with your mobile phone, but can have been taken with any digital device that supports EXIF timestamps. Sure, you may want to embed the location information in the pictures on your computer, but if you mainly publish to Flickr, then this solution may appeal to you.
• Egg on your Facebook: Wayfinder Systems is the Swedish company that in 2006 created Wayfinder Earth (blogged here), which does a good job of putting a virtual globe on a smart phone. On Feb 8 the company released a press release (in Swedish, translated into English here) announcing the availability of a Facebook application, LocateMate, that lets you share your location and your saved routes with your Facebook friends. Embedding your live location onto Facebook is a cool idea, so I tried to test it. Only problem: The Facebook application is nowhere to be found as of this writing on Feb 10. Oops.
• David Rumsey’s maps in Second Life: Historical maps draped over 3D terrain that you can walk through. made by Nathan Babcock and reviewed (with eye candy) in Not Possible IRL. Definitely worth a visit — you may be doing something like this in a product by Microsoft or Google soon.
• OS blocks overlay: That dynamic KML overlay of the UK Ordnance Survey’s tiles made by Gavin Brock and blogged back in December? Now blocked. (Thanks for the heads up, Frank)
• HoudahGeo interview: Paul Robinson of Kupuk interviews Pierre Bernard, developer of HoudahGeo for the Mac. Interesting behind-the scenes info about what it is like to be an indie geo-developer.
• Saudi oil map companion: Very cool: the blog Satellite o’er the Desert by “Joules Burn” (hah) bills itself as the unofficial web companion to Matthew Simmons’s book Twilight in the Desert (which purports to show that Saudi oil is running out faster than we think). The blog is chock full of analysis of Saudi oil fields, using Google Earth’s satellite imagery for visualizations. It’s an interesting use of the imagery available online.

Noted investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has an article in the current issue of The New Yorker that revisits the night-time Israeli bombing raid of an installation in Syria on September 6, 2007. He concludes that the bombed building was likely not an incipient nuclear project, but possibly a chemical weapons project, and that North Korean construction workers likely were present on site.

There is one very interesting passage where Hersh himself engages in forensic neogeography!

The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied [Institute for Science and International Security’s (ISIS) David] Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in Syria.

Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but, according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said. “I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack, why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?

The whole article is worth a read. (ISIS’s Albright claims his quote was taken out of context by Hersh, BTW.)

This topic was previously blogged on Ogle Earth here, here and here. (Via Ubikcan, which flagged the above passage and others too. Read that blog’s analysis as well.)

It’s been a busy week in Stockholm, but here is the first installment in the catch-up effort:

• VideoTrace: If you thought GeoImmersive video was cool, you’ll love VideoTrace: Draw on video footage to create 3D models of objects! (Watch the video.) By the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at the University of Adelaide, presented at Siggraph 2007. (Thanks, Anton)
• Covert Warfare: Remember those arcade games where you would glide over enemy territory in 2.5D and try to bomb everything to oblivion while it all shoots back at you? Now you can do the same but with Google Earth imagery as the base in Covert Warfare, a game by the Spanish indie studio Clandestine Works for Windows XP and Vista. ($20, free trial.) You can even make your own levels by marking up Google Earth content. Not sure what the copyright implications are, but I’m sure we will find out:-)…

• iTag: iTag, an IPTC/XMP photo tagging tool for Windows previously noted for its Google Earth-savvy tools, has just gotten another geosavvy update: You can now do address-based searches on your previously georeferenced photos “and iTag will find geocoded photos that are nearby”.
• Caligari + Virtual Earth: Interesting: Microsoft is acquiring Caligari, developers of the 3D modeling software trueSpace, used for virtual online 3D meetings among other things. If you read Caligari CEO Roman Ormandy’s forum post, Virtual Earth is on course to turn itself into a metaverse replete with avatars. I’m just hoping this does not once again retard development for a Mac OS X of Virtual Earth 3D.
• Garmin’s Nüvifone: (how I hate intentional spelling mistakes): Everything the iPhone should have been. Only problem: It’s due Q3 2008, which is around the time that the iPhone will also be everything the iPhone should have been.
• London Google Earth Course: Noel Jenkins and Dave Holmes are doing a course in London about Google Earth on February 28, aimed at teachers. More info here.
• Muawai writes:
  

  I want to download google earth 4.2, but my country Sudan is not in the available list.What could I do?

  Yes, it’s stupid but true — Here’s why. The easiest solution: Tor. Bittorrent versions of Google Earth also will let you circumvent this limitation, or settle for Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

• Earth Point: Bill Clark’s Earth Point: Simple Excel to KML conversion.