I can’t help it: I just love stories where earnest well-meaning people petition Google to rectify grievous toponymic errors. Consider “the Persian Gulf”, AKA “the Arabian Gulf”, wisely AKA “the Gulf”. On Feb 7, the National Iranian American Council issued a press release that began:

NIAC Protests Google’s Use of Divisive Terms for the Persian Gulf

Washington DC – NIAC has protested Google’s inclusion of the politically divisive term “Arabian Gulf” on its application Google Earth. Historically, the usage of this term for the Persian Gulf has been led by pan-Arab figures such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to rally the Arab masses against the non-Arab peoples in the Middle East.

I went looking at this gulf, and was surprised (but amused) to find that Google has decided to hedge its bets and call the gulf both Arabian and Persian:

But that, apparently, was not enough to appease the NIAC:

Last week, NIAC’s Board sent a letter to Google’s CEO, Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, pointing out the political nature of including this alternative term for the Persian Gulf on their applications. NIAC is also seeking a meeting with Schmidt to ensure that the mistake is corrected.

Somehow I don’t think that including all possible names for this gulf was an unintentional error.

Then today, in my inbox, the next phase in this wonderful war for the hearts and minds of Google Earth users… The Iranian Students News Agency ISNA reports:

TEHRAN, Feb. 08 (ISNA)-“No war in Persian Gulf” was the most important message that artists delivered in the 15th Persian Gulf Environmental Art Festival in Hormuz island to show both Iranians [sic] peace-loving nature and prevent distorting the name of this gulf.

The sentence was designed and written in huge size on a monochromatic part of the island with good aerial look to be seen on Google Earth.

This has to be the single-most innovative political protest of the new millennium: Dislike the labels in Google Earth? Write your own for all to see.

[PS: National Geographic Magazine got a similar treatment back in 2004.]

So I’ve been wanting to take professional-looking 360-degree panoramas of late, and decided to get me some gear. Good new DSLR? Check. Solid tripod? Check. Fish-eye lens? Check. And then I saw this:

Darn. 360-degree streaming immersive video? Of London? Of humpback whales? Georeferenced and mapped onto Google Maps? Want a buzzword for 2008 — here it is: GeoImmersive video, by a company called Immersive Media. No word on pricing for these systems yet, but I’m already feeling so behind the curve… (Yes, there is an ESRI ArcGIS extension available.) (Via PanoToolsNG Yahoo group) [PS: Can’t wait for the live immersive webcams in Google Earth.]

Dr. Mark Mulligan of the Environmental Monitoring and Modelling Research Group at King’s College London is responsible for putting online a remarkable and valuable collection of climatic KML datasets blogged in detail back in July 2007.

He’s just added some crowdsourcing projects to the collection — where you can help collect the data — and updated other datasets. He writes:

Just a quick update on activities at www.kcl.ac.uk/geodata

I have added a series of GEOWIKI databases – these are collaborative databases in which users contribute to the development of the datasets which, when quality controlled, will be downloadable for use. We are asking volunteers to give up a bit of time to use the simple Google Earth based editing tools to add data for two databases at the moment.

The first is a database of the locations of dams visible in the GE imagery and the second is mapping large crowns in the Amazon for a research project on biodiversity conservation. Explanations of the research objectives are given with the datasets. Both will require a lot of effort to complete.

I have updated the Avoidable deforestation dataset which shows global time series of tree cover change.

A new database called Conservation-eye has been developed (last year). This shows recent tree cover change in protected areas throughout the world and is intended as a type of ‘protected areas watch’.

Terrascope has been updated to include almost global coverage for the LANDSAT 1990 imagery.

The others have minor changes (eg video previews) but remain pretty much as they were.

It’s best-of-breed stuff, so check it out and try your hand at being a crowd source.

I’m in a bus on the way to the airport (again), but in Sweden that means I can whip out my laptop and get 7.2 mbps wireless connectivity via an HSDPA modem (my service provider is Tre). I thought I might spend the time productively by trying Symarctic’s ExtGPS (beta), a free S60 application that purports to turn my Nokia N95 into a Bluetooth-enabled GPS device usable by Google Earth Plus or Pro to show my location live.

It turns out to work quite well. You do have to read the setup instructions carefully, as you need to add a new (virtual) serial port manually to support ExtGPS’s services. But I got it to work on Mac OS X 10.5. Here is the result:

Added bonus: The above pictures were taken by the Nokia N95 while it was also beaming GPS coordinates to the Mac! Hoping for a trifecta, I also tried to simultaneously use the phone as the HSDPA Bluetooth modem instead of my dedicated USB Huawei modem, but that was just a step too far. It was either ExtGPS via Bluetooth or internet connectivity via Bluetooth, but not both. Oh well, we can’t have it all:-)

• Neogeography in the media, I: BBC: GPS helps pygmies defend forest. If it works in the Amazon, there’s no reason why it can’t work in Africa.
• Neogeography in the media, II: The Wall Street Journal’s Mossberg Solution reviews the SPOT Satellite Messenger. Tell the world where you are (or ask for help) from anywhere, cheaply, via satellite. No mobile phone network required!
• Neogeography in the media, III: BBC: Egyptology from the air. Video showing some cool aerial shots of Amarna, Akhenaten’s ancient capital, taken from an unmanned balloon. More about the city in this BBC article. Amarna has been featured in the context of Google Earth here on Ogle Earth before.
• Metaverse Conference: Metaverse U is a two-day conference hosted by Stanford University’s Humanities Lab on February 16-17 where a range of interesting speakers will discuss, well, metaverses. In addition to the usual suspects, what’s interesting is that Rebecca Moore, of Google Earth Outreach, is also a speaker. No doubt because Google Earth is the most popular specimen of a specific subset of metaverse, the mirror world. (Register by February 11)

  Which reminds me, how is that “Social Google Earth” going, you know the one being tested last September at Arizona State University that would be “publicly launched later this year”, i.e. 2007, according to Google Operating System blog?

  And whatever happened to CNET’s “scoop” last October about the hook-up between Google and Multiverse Networks? Blogs, you just can’t trust ’em:-) (Via Terra Nova)

• GEOPortal soft-launches: KMLabs notes the stealth launch of GEOPortal, by the European Space Agency’s Group on Earth Observations. It’s open source and soon downloadable so that you can incorporate it on your own website. It looks quite slick — it’s a browser-based 3D globe onto which you can attach all manner of information. Not so much a mapping solution as a new way of getting at country-level info, however. (At least that is the impression I got.)
• Nokia Location Tagger: Nokia Beta Labs’ just-released Location Tagger automatically adds EXIF data to the photos you take with Nokia S60 phones like my Nokia N95. Yay! But what took them so long? It’s the obvious thing to do with a GPS-enabled camera phone. (More in that vein over at Dan Catt’s Geobloggers.)

  EXIF-based georeferencing beats Shozu‘s clever but stop-gap geotagging when uploading to Flickr from an N95; but now I can still use Shozu to upload photos on the fly to Flickr, as Flickr can read EXIF tags and automatically map georeferenced photos. Check out the instructions for details.

• ArcGIS Explorer update: ArcGIS Explorer version 450 is released, fixing some compatibility issues with graphics cards.
• KML Regions how-to: GeoChalkboard is knee-deep into a tutorial on KML Regions, first basic, then advanced, and now on how to use Regions with Arc2Earth.
• Crysis 3D Warehouse: The geniuses at Digital Urban have figured out how to import any model in Google’s 3D Warehouse into the current hit first-person shooter Crysis. This takes the concept of modding to a whole new level.

Why map just three dimensions when we live in four? That’s the reason Google Earth got a timeline, but until now we’ve never had a shared repository for georeferenced historical events, at least not in the same way that we have shared repositories for georeferenced photos, like Panoramio.

Time Space Map to the rescue! “Time Space Map is an encyclopedic, online atlas of history and happenings that anyone can edit. It is a geographic wiki.”

Time Space Map is the brainchild of Frank San Miguel, who wrote in with some fascinating context about this new site, so I leave the rest of this post to him:

I was one of the creators of mapquest.com. This was during the time of the first web browsers and I wouldn’t shut up about this new thing called the web. They finally let me build a prototype and so was born project webmapper which became project mapquest, and eventually mapquest.com (There were many others without whom mapquest would have never happened).

Ever since I left mapquest in the late 90’s I have dreamed of building an immersive mapping application that would let people travel through time to any place in the past and see what it was like. It was an impractical idea at the time, but things have changed recently. The result is Time Space Map, an encyclopedic, online atlas of history and happenings that anyone can edit. It is a geographic wiki. Here’s my introduction.

In case you are interested, here is an essay about the early days of mapquest, why a good idea isn’t good enough.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all of Wikipedia’s historical events could be mapped to Time Space Map via some automated process? (That would avoid a lot of duplicated effort.) Wouldn’t it be nice if Google Earth’s timeline could be put to use exploring the history of any place you care to zoom in on, via a KML network link served by Time Space Map? Can you imagine the wonderful new ways of doing a your history project in school? I was born way too early:-) I love the sudden burst of potential and opportunity an innovative site like this brings about.

Pardon this wholly self-referential post, but I took some photos during my vacation in Ethiopia, and I couldn’t pass by the opportunity to put them on a map. It’s remarkable how much of Ethiopia is in sub-meter resolution in Google Earth — it makes manual georeferencing a pleasure, and even more accurate than GPS. check out the KML file attached to the larger map:

View Larger Map

I used Adam Franco’s excellent Flickr Photo Set to KML tool to make this map.

Some notes: Google’s Panoramio is fantastic, but I use Flickr to store and share my photos online. Much as I’d love to add my photos to Google Earth’s default layer, I’m not going to double my efforts by uploading and geotagging them again to Panoramio. That’s just inefficient.

The solution is obvious from a end-user perspective, but perhaps not so obvious from the perspective of two competitors — Google and Yahoo. I’d like to be able to tell Flickr (owned by Yahoo) that one, some or all photos of mine that I’ve geotagged may be depicted in a Google Earth base layer, just by ticking a check box.

That way, Flickr wins by offering an added service to its users (in addition to the in-house social mapping goodness, which nevertheless is thin on non-US high-resolution satellite imaging data), while Google gets to show more photos on Google Earth. And I get to avoid duplicating the effort involved in georeferencing my photos when I upload them. (I used FlickrExport for Aperture.) It would be a win-win-win situation for all involved, no?

PS: The above argument counts for other photo sharing sites with geotagging abilities too, of course.