Some interesting content has been cropping up lately as KML:

• Anthropogenic biomes are “globally-significant ecological patterns within the terrestrial biosphere caused by sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems.” Now you can see what and where they are on Google Earth, Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth. (Give the layer some time to download for a given view.) Made with Arc2Earth!
• The US Environmental Protection Agency now georeferences its emissions measuring stations and puts them into a KML layer. Download everything or just the region and the pollutant you are interested in.

Meanwhile, some other tools keep on improving:

• Version 3 of the open-source content management system Plone is now supported by PleiadesGeocoder, which lets you georeference Plone objects. Thus writes Sean Gillies at Import Cartography.
• Favorite Mac GPS GPX/KML uploader/downloader LoadMyTracks gets Leopard compatibility.
• World Wind’s KML support now includes timeline functions.

An employee at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s writes in:

The ABC is covering today’s [Saturday] [Australian] Federal election in Google Earth. Live updates start at 6pm – 11pm AEST. The kml contains stories, videos, as well as color coded election data.

Google’s own effort is here, which provides good background reference material.

• MSFT + KML, cont.: Virtual Earth’s API now lets you import KML and GPX data, and there was a new update to the imagery over the weekend. Neocons, before giving Google any more of a hard time for their Israel imagery, kindly go check out Jerusalem on Virtual Earth.
• Antarctic Traverse live: The Norwegian-US Scientific Traverse of East Antarctica is currently underway, in which a bunch of lucky scientists get to drive to the South Pole across the world’s largest ice sheet with monster trucks. The whole thing is mapped to KML live here.
• Swedish imagery: I was going to turn this into a post but time was lacking: An article in Sweden’s Ny Teknik (in Swedish) explains why Sweden’s imagery is so poor in Google Earth. There exists a lot of aerial photography of Sweden, but it is being closely held by Sweden’s national geographic agency, Lantmäteriverket. Just like with the UK’s Ordnance Survey, existing licensing terms would make it prohibitive for Google to incorporate all the imagery in Google Earth — in fact, it would cost Google USD1.9 million per year to use it, says Google in the article.

  What options are there? Google could do like Microsoft, and commission its own aerial imagery — many Swedish towns are now visible in glorious bird’s eye view in Virtual Earth. Or it could strike deals with individual communities — in the last update, Umeå made sure it is in high resolution by donating its imagery to Google. Smart move, but such an ad hoc solution is a lot of work, considering how many communities there are.

• India hearts Google Earth? And another story from a while back, spiked for lack of time: At the occasion of the launch of the Millennium Development Goal Monitor, Indian media found the opportunity to ask Google Earth CTO Michael Jones whether India had ever asked or demanded the censorship of Indian imagery. The answer?
  

  ”We talked to them. We meet with them. We travel constantly to India. We do not want to be a problem. We go and talk to them and say how do you feel about this? Of course every country is nervous; nervous is the wrong word; when something is new and more dated than before. They are just curious if this is going to be good or bad,” he said.

  Jones said there has been no attempt ever not to show the information it has. ”Everything, we have we show. As soon as we get data, we publish it. We buy satellite data. We buy airplane data. That is what we show in Google earth, all the data we have got so far,” Jones said.

  Cough Basra cough. Still, as if to back up Jones’s substantive point, India’s new army chief Deepak Kapoor is “not losing sleep” over Google Earth, reports newindpress.com: “Kapoor feels that Army needs to take the new technology into its stride and adjust their war doctrines accordingly.” He seems to be part of the new guard of Indian military leaders, which is encouraging.

• Sky pictures: steph:s layer for Google Sky adds gorgeous overlay pictures from Johannes Hevelius’s 1690 star atlas Firmamentum Sobiescianum. What I’m still looking for, however, is an overlay that contains the boundaries between constellations, which is much more useful to amateur astronomers. Anybody found such a layer yet? Or made one?
• Mirror Says: From last week, a somewhat hysterical article by the UK’s Daily Mirror in which Ed Parsons makes a valiant attempt to explain why Google Earth is Good ™.
• Audio + KML: Richard Treves shows you how to make a self-paced audio tour of placemarks by embedding a Flash application into KML, though it is usable only with the PC version of Google Earth — I’d add a link to a place on the web where you can hear the tour for non-Windows users, as a fall-back.

GeoRSS Weblog finds a gem. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard comes with DashCode, a tool for developing widgets to populate the Mac’s dashboard… One of the pre-made templates is for a Google Map, and all you have to do — literally — is add a GeoRSS or KML URL, get a Google Maps API key, and publish. Really:

I borrowed the USGS GeoRSS feed for earthquakes and made this in 2 minutes:

Isn’t it gorgeous? None of it is my doing. Download the widget.

But nothing’s perfect — I found the tool balking at some of the KML I threw at it, and of course, it only works on a Mac — here’s wishing this thing could output javascript for embedding in websites. Still, I’m somewhat stunned by how idiot-proof programming has become.

Last month I visited my first real live archaeological excavation — the Ramesside temple complex at Kom Firin in the Nile delta, currently being excavated by a team from the British Museum.

That area of the delta just recently got a high-resolution imagery update in Google Earth, so even though it is in the middle of nowhere, we were able to get there through the judicious use of Mobile GMaps and my Nokia N95’s built-in GPS. (Egypt has excellent mobile phone coverage.)

I took some snapshots of the visit (which I uploaded to Flickr), but at one point I also stood on a hillock, held out my arm, and put the Nokia to work making a 360-degree panorama. This wasn’t a high-tech proposition — I really just took a photo, turned a bit to the right, took another, etc… about 15 times.

The object of that little experiment was to see if I couldn’t create a 360-degree panorama in Google Earth. The answer was yes, with an additional unexpected use for the georeferenced photos on Flickr — you can turn them into placemarks and position them in front of the panorama, in effect creating clickable hotspots usable from within Google Earth’s PhotoOverlay view.

Here’s the resulting file. Double-click on the “Kom Firin 360” item to enter the PhotoOverlay viewing mode (give it some time to download the tiles, poor server). Notice how the placemarks float in front of the overlay but disappear as you zoom in. You can click on a placemark to see the popup containing a thumbnail of the photo, which links through to the corresponding URL on Flickr.

Here’s how to make your own:

Turning the set of georeferenced images from Kom Firin on Flickr into a KML file was easy. I used Adam Franco’s excellent Flickr set to KML converter.

Then I set to work on the panorama. I used DoubleTake for the Mac, which imports a whole series of partial panorama images and does a remarkable job guessing how to match and stitch them. Perfectionists can spend hours fine-tuning, but luckily I am from the “good-enough” school of editing in this regard.

(Some tips: While stitching the images manually, I set the program to 360-degree mode, but when it was time to export a big jpeg image, I turned that off and cropped manually — it just results in fewer hassles.)

The exported jpeg image (weighing in at 27MB) was then processed by CASA’s most excellent Java app PhotoOverlay Creator. I ran it in Windows on my Mac. The result is a folder containing hundreds of small jpeg files, comprising a “pyramid” of progressively more detailed images that get loaded only when you zoom in on a part of the image. These were then uploaded to Ogle Earth’s web server.

I did some tweaking on the KML file produced by PhotoOverlay Creator, however. Fortunately, it is easy to have it open in a text editor, make changes and then choose “revert” on the file in Google Earth, which in effect refreshes it. Using the opacity slider, I was able to have the horizon in the panorama match the horizon in Google Earth (by playing with <bottomFov> and <topFov>). I also played with the radius of the panorama (using <near>) so that a number of nearby georeferenced placemarks would be inside its circumference.

(Tip: Because I had lowered the field of view in order to match the horizons, I had to raise the camera’s height to avoid the panorama being cut off at the bottom when zoomed out.)

(Another tip: You can control the direction of the panorama by changing the camera’s <heading> value. Luckily for the imagery I took, there are some very distinct landmarks nearby (the tree, the magazine, the lake) visible on Google Earth’s base imagery, so it was easy to precisely position the view.)

Then came the fun part. It turns out that placemarks near the camera are visible when you are in PhotoOverlay viewing mode. If — as is the case with the KML produced by Adam Franco’s Flickr to KML converter — the KML contains placemarks with photos as icons and in the popups, then you can position these in front of the panorama as clickable hotspots, merely by adjusting their height.

This part is a bit fidgety, but not as fidgety as you might think. It is quite easy to get a good correlation between the view in the panorama, the view on Google Earth’s base imagery, and the georeferenced images from Flickr.

The result, I think, gives a pretty good indication of what it’s like to be at an archaeological excavation in the Nile Delta, with plenty of opportunity for storytelling via placemarks.

[Update 21:53 UTC: Thanks for Ben Hagemark (who’s worked with the Gigapan and Gigapxl default layers in Google Earth) for pointing out two further possible enhancements to the final file: You can link to the PhotoOverlay view directly by adding an id to the PhotoOverlay tag (e.g. id=”kom_firin_360″) and then linking to it in the description for the popup balloon, like so: <a href=”#kom_firin_360″>Fly into this panorama.</a>. Another improvement is to link the balloon of each photo to the next. We’ve seen this in Google Earth’s newest default layers, and here is how to do it: give each placemark a different id, for example id=”photo1″, then in the description of each balloon, link to the id of the next placemark, like so so: <a href=”#photo2;balloon”>Next photo</a>. Technical note: Make sure to wrap the description text inside a <![CDATA[…]]> tag to avoid syntax errors.]

Soon, the WSJ will be free. Until then, you will have to click on this backdoor link to read today’s article extolling the virtues of Google Earth Outreach. The occasion is Appalachian Voices‘ new feature on its website where you enter a US zip code to see which specific mountains may have had their tops removed to provide you with energy. Here are the tops I helped remove when I lived in DC.

Appalachian Voices has had a default layer on Google Earth for the better part of a year in addition to the full version on their website, so that part isn’t new, and their new feature uses Google Maps only and not Google Earth (at the moment?), but there is more coming just like it, says Rebecca Moore:

Rebecca Moore, manager of the Google Earth Outreach program, calls the Appalachian Voices service “very cutting edge” and says other groups are preparing similar ones. The Earth Outreach program, officially rolled out in June, provides technical advice and training to nonprofits interested in using Google Earth.

And then there is news (to me) of another company leveraging Google Earth as a geobrowser for PR. Dole Foods:

Some companies are using Google Earth in a similar manner to try to connect customers to the places where their food comes from. Dole Food Co., for one, has added a code to the label of organic bananas that consumers can enter at a special Web site. The site provides information about the history and location of the farm where the bananas grew, as well as a link to data that can be viewed in Google Earth. There consumers can zoom in on aerial images of the farm.

Alas, Dole Foods’s website seems to be down at the moment.

The first car I remember was my parent’s dark green 1972 Audi 100 LS Coupé, in which I was driven to the Alpine meadows where I took my first steps. Ever since I’ve had an irrational affinity for Audis — but they are the Apple Computer of cars. Glad to see, then, that Audi is introducing a new concept car at the Los Angeles Auto Show today that comes with Google Earth built in. The complete excerpt from the long press release:

Google Earth, the interactive, three-dimensional atlas of the world, has gained a firm role on all personal computers. Now this software is making life easier on the road too. Audi has, for the first time ever, brought together the merits of the internet-based system Google Earth and its own built-in navigation system to create countless information facilities with user-friendly graphics.

The high-resolution display and photorealistic 3D maps provide a new dimension in intuitively understandable bird’s eye visualisations that are rich in detail. The image angle and section can of course be adjusted to suit the driver’s wishes at any time. By connecting to the internet, it will also be possible in future for traffic and weather information or even data on air quality to be included and taken into account in planning your route.

Using Google Earth’s search function, the driver can also find addresses or service providers at the chosen destination and navigate directly to them — for instance restaurants, car parks or an Audi dealer.

To enter a navigation destination, there is no longer any need to enter the address by hand. The driver can click on an image in the Google Earth user interface and be directed to the identified destination.

Yum, Google Earth on a touch screen. Considering that Audi is the luxury division of Volkswagen, it is not too much of a stretch to assume that this Google Earth installation is a refinement of the prototype demoed by Volkswagen 18 months ago. Also, I approve of the assumption that soon all cars will have their own HSDPA data connection. Alas, the car is still a concept car. Another problem: I haven’t owned a car since 1993:-)