A property development dispute in Karachi got some help from Google Earth this week. The article in Pakistan’s Daily Times is a thicket of acronyms, but if I understand right, a section of a park (one of a precious few in Karachi) is being developed by the town council for housing. The council claims such development was always intended, and that the infrastructure for it was laid in the 1990s, but petitioners have managed to show in court that the construction of sewage lines is recent (and visible in Google Earth). The judge has now adjourned the case for a few weeks so that the court can “summon residents to establish the facts.” (That’s a novel concept:-)

The Google Earth Community layer labels many of the places mentioned in the article. Here they are below. Included is an educated guess as to which construction imagery the court is talking about.

View Larger Map

Thank you very much, James, for making a wish come true. Constellation borders in Google Sky — go get them at Barnabu.co.uk.

As of this morning, downloads of Google Earth are of version 4.2.205.5730 (for Mac and PC) vs 4.2.198.2451 Beta previously. I can’t find any changes to the feature set, but perhaps for the Mac version it’ll run more stably on OS X 10.5.1 Leopard. So have a download.

PS: Thanks everyone for sending me links to this article called TechCrunch Heading Towards Extinction? or something:-)

Well, wow. And how I wish I had more time on my hands. ZapWizard writes:

If you don’t know the biggest PC game of the year is Crysis. The maps are huge, and the detail intense. The game is set on a tropical island, and Crytek the company who made Crysis has released a great editor called SandBox2.

When I started making my custom single player map for Crysis, my first stop was Google Earth. I used Google Earth to make a 1:1 scale version of Monuriki, the island in Fiji used to film the movie Castaway. I used Google SketchUp to ensure things stayed 1:1 scale. The images for my island were extracted from Google Earth.I also used geo-tagged photos from Picasa as additional reference. I am even using Google Docs to write my storyline and have friends collaborate on the document. I am documenting how I made my island for other map makers by posting high-def video tutorials on DivX Stage6.

I have a flickr set of images here.

The how-to videos are here.

The project forum post is here.

I’m at the Online Educa Berlin conference for one of my day jobs. Some of the exhibitors are showing off their latest smart boards, and one in particular stood out for its looks — Smart Technologies‘ brand new Smart Board 600i.

I was allowed to play with it. It is very intuitive: Just touch to click, touch and move to click and drag, etc. There are also different colored pens and other software drivers that help teachers be more effective in a classroom — draw on the board and you’re also recording everything on the computer; it does handwriting recognition, there is a popup keyboard, and you can draw on top of anything the screen shows.

What I really wanted to do, however, is make my own poor man’s future user interface for Google Earth, so I convinced them to install the application. (This is how I discovered that the download process for Google Earth has been completely revamped — it now comes with an automatic updater attached). The results are below:

It’s a lot of fun to use, and it certainly made people stop and look. I found myself using the on-screen controls, which I otherwise never do, as in this kind of user interface, you don’t really control- or shift-click all that naturally. You really just want to drag the Earth around.

But at one point I also wanted to use two hands (or fingers) to rotate and zoom in on the Earth. That, alas is not possible yet with this machine. Still, if you have one of these in the classroom (and many Swedish classrooms have one) you should really consider using it for a lesson in immersive geography.

(Oh, in my enthusiasm I forgot to ask how much one of these would set me back. Their website isn’t saying.)

The new collaborative maps feature for Google Maps is an yet another example of how previously third-party-only API-based extensions for maps inevitably become folded into Google’s default offering. That’s progress.

But how does this new feature stack up to Tagzania, my current workhorse for collaborative mapping? Before today, we were planning to use Tagzania as the collaborative mapping solution for IPY.org’s next International Polar Day, focusing on ice sheets, coming up on December 13. Should we switch to Google’s tool?

It’s important to realize that Google’s collaborative tool is not in exactly the same space as Tagzania’s. Google Maps now excels at inviting people you know and trust to edit your maps. Tagzania works differently: Everyone can contribute their own placemarks and assign to them a common tag — perhaps a pre-agreed tag, but not a tag that is exclusive to anyone.

Once you do get editing privileges in Google Maps, those privileges go all the way — you can move other people’s placemarks, and alter the text in popup bubbles. That’s powerful, unless of course you set the collaboration preferences so that anyone can edit the map. I accidentally moved a placemark on the collaborative map of surf spots touted by Google Lat-Long blog… sorry! Other people, no doubt, will see this as an opportunity for mischief.

With Tagzania, spammers could conceivably rain on your parade by adding spam placemarks and giving it loads of irrelevant tags, but they wouldn’t be able to destroy your own hard work. In the case of IPY.org’s needs, where we want anyone to be able to note their participation in the International Polar Day, the indestructibility of content is very important.

Ideally, we’d have a tool where an owner is in charge of a map to which anyone can contribute their own placemarks, no-one can alter others’ placemarks, and where the owner can weed out the spoilsports. In Tagzanian parlance, that would be the equivalent of “owning” a specific tag name, and being able to disallow inappropriate placemarks from using it. Neither Tagzania nor Google Maps gives us that kind of tool at the moment, but Tagzania’s comes closest to what we need.

That doesn’t make Google’s offering worse in terms of collaboration — just differently focused.

One more thing: Both Google Maps and Tagzania offer KML network links to their collaborative maps, so that they are always up to date.

PS: Google has also just announced you can now upload KML files from your computer to Google Maps, in addition to visualizing those accessible via a URL. Unfortunately, I’m not succeeding in getting any KML files to upload at all at the moment. Is anyone else having this problem?

Now this is the sort of public domain science resource I’ll gladly pay taxes for. From www.IPY.org:

A new satellite image of the Antarctic continent is now ready for all to see and use. The IPY Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) project has been completed and its stunning result is freely available for the first time today. Compiled from over 1000 Landsat scenes, the result is a 15-metre resolution, near seamless and cloudless image mosaic of the continent.

A team from NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey have worked together for more than a year to produce this uniformly and rigorously processed surface reflectance dataset. In addition to providing scientists with a new tool for discovery and planning, LIMA also provides everyone with a previously unseen and realistic view of the continent.

You can browse the imagery in a web-based viewer today at the mirror sites lima.usgs.gov or lima.nasa.gov. Unfotunately, these sites break on Mac browsers and only work well on Windows. Not to fear, the imagery is in the public domain, which means it is only a matter of weeks not months before we can expect to have this crop up in the base layer of Google Earth and NASA World Wind. (Full disclosure: I posted the above to IPY.org on behalf of the LIMA team.)