• Google Earth bug fix: Google Earth gets a bugfix update, to v4.2.0198. From the release notes:
  • SpaceNavigator support for sky. [Works on the Mac:-)]
  • Fixed several crashes in PhotoOverlay
  • Reverted “Restrict time display to folder” checkbox default to off
  • Fixed inadvertent photo flip for sperical PhotoOverlays with tilt less than 90
• Burning Man: Valery Hronusov posts the KML file of the aerial shots over Burning Man 2007.
• Bluetooth GPS for Nikon: This looks like the best solution yet for turning Nikons into GPS-enabled cameras: Red Hen Systems‘ Blue2Can, a bluetooth adapter. I want one.
• 3D Route Builder for Google Earth “is a powerful utility for fine grain control over paths directly in Google Earth. These can then be either built from scratch or based on existing KML or GPX exported and then driving the route at specific speed.”
• WorldView launch: DigitalGlobe is launching another orbiting camera on September 18 — WorldView I, reports Reuters. See the launch live here. Weird tidbit:
  

  DigitalGlobe built the satellite in part with $500 million in funding from the Pentagon’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), but it can sell the images commercially as long as their resolution is no sharper than a half-meter.

  Says what law? I thought the only country for which US laws set resolution limits for imagery sold by US satellite companies was Israel. Or is this half-meter limit a new licensing restriction for WorldView? In any case, down the line this satellite and WorldView II will likely result in more frequent, more accurate updates for Google Earth.

• DrupalCon: It’s DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 on September 19-22, and Dan Karran will be there, touting Drupal as a GeoCMS.
• Nokia 6110 with GPS review: Steffen Nork tries the GPS tracking on the Nokia 6110, and likes it. On a related front: Ever since switching to Vodafone here in Cairo, the assisted GPS on my Nokia N95 is impressively quick — I’m getting a lock in seconds, and with partially obscured skies! Suddenly, the GPS on this phone is usable. It seems that your phone company provider makes a big difference in this regard.
• New Virtual Earth developer blog: Hannes’s Virtual Earth Blog (Via GIS Lounge and Virtual Earth / Live Map)
• ArcGIS Export to KML: James Fee has news of a update to Export to KML, version 2.4, for ArcGIS.
• KML to GeoRSS: In a reversal of how the production flow usually goes, BRIGHTi Geofeeder takes KML, Shapefiles, GML, Mapinfo or Autodesk files and converts them into GeoRSS. Free demo. (Via Virtual Earth / Live Maps)
• Google Maps upgrade: 54 more countries get data in Google Maps. Google Earth has had the populated places for a while, but now Google Maps is ahead in terms of road coverage. No directions from Kabul to Kandahar, however:-) At least not yet.
• Rocket Garden Visualizer: Google’s Lunar XPrize website contains one pedagogical tool that uses Google Earth. Give the form an address, and you get a KML file back depicting life-size scale models of various rockets. Put them next to historic landmarks to get an even cooler context:

  

• Fantastic story: Julian Bencito goes way beyond the call of homework duty, enlisting Google Earth’s help. And thus the virtual once again becomes real…

  

• Google Moon. (Via Lat Long Blog). A version for Google Earth is on the way, says the FAQ. Bull’s Rambles argues that NASA World Wind has had this for a while. Still, Google Moon’s datasets are detailed, delicious and accessible.
• Old Skies: We’re used to historians and archaeologists using KML to mark sites of interest. One web resource went a bit further: Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire also shows you Assyrian constellations marked out for Google Sky. A bit rudimentary, but a very good idea.
• Political PhotoOverlay: Another innovative use of Google Earth as a political tool: An iconic photo reminding us of China’s spotty human rights record presented as a KML 2.2 PhotoOverlay:

  

• KML Circle: Digital Sanitation Engineering‘s Nick Galbreath has created kmlcircle, a Google Code project for generating KML that describes circles, polygons and stars.
• gpicsync: Another Google Code project: gpicsync, for georeferencing photos using GPS tracks. (Via AnyGeo)
• EPA chooses VE: News that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chose Microsoft Virtual Earth over Google Earth. Digital Earth Blog puzzles over EPA’s stated reasons. I wonder if the main reason wasn’t that Virtual Earth, being browser-based, is free to use by businesses, whereas Google Earth was not until recently. I myself am puzzling over why the EPA chose a specific client rather than a standard, like KML. It’s like announcing back in 1995 that you’ve decided to adopt Internet Explorer for all your web publishing, as opposed to HTML.
• Project Kraken? Matt Giger is upset with last week’s Economist article for not mentioning his EarthBrowser as the first geobrowser. I was an early user of Earthbrowser, and while it was fun and innovative, it wasn’t a geobrowser, in that anyone can publish their own content to it. That’s what defines the geoweb, and it is what Keyhole Earth first allowed with KML.

  In the same post Matt mentions Project Kraken as his next big project, to be released in the next 30 days. “It will compete for mindshare with Google Earth” he says, but he’s not revealing much more just yet. Anyone willing to venture a guess what it might be?

• Mars: Remember those mysterious holes on Mars? There’s a new, more revealing view of them. Here’s a closeup. (Via Astronomy Blog)

Yahoo has announced MapMixer (Beta). It lets you add overlays over its base mapping layers, allows you to embed the resulting map on your own website, and then gives the user opacity controls. Here’s one user’s live example, of an old map of Singapore overlaid on Yahoo’s Singapore imagery.

While you can also overlay images in Google Earth, export the result as KML and show that on a Google Map (and then embed it if you want), MapMixer lets you do three things that Google’s tools don’t:

1. It lets you upload and place an overlay from within a browser.
2. Google Maps won’t give you an opacity slider to play with for the overlay.
3. It is easier to accurately position a map than in Google Earth. With MapMixer you are asked to pin matching locations on both the base map and the overlay — much like how Microsoft’s MapCruncher works, except that MapCruncher is a Windows only application. MapMixer plays nice inside a web browser. meanwhile, as Google Earth’s built-in tool doesn’t let you correlate matching placemarks, you end up fiddling a lot.

One advantage that Google does have over both Yahoo and Microsoft: An overlay made using Google Earth is exportable as KML, and that’s now a standard that both Yahoo and Microsoft will inevitably adopt. I can’t help wishing that maps made with Yahoo MapMixer were exportable as a KMZ file today, so I could use this tool to create overlays I can show in a KML-savvy client of my choice.

[Update: Christian Spanring wonders about copyright issues.]

News today is that the UK’s publicly funded (1) Ordnance Survey has come out with Explore (beta), a portal for uploading and sharing… routes.

OS isn’t the first to come out with this. Plenty of other private initiatives have already done the same using mapping APIs. (Check out the impressive Bikemap.de, walk.jog.run, Wikiloc, EveryTrail and Crankfire). More recently Google’s MyMaps has upped the ante with an incredibly sophisticated web-based map editor and mashup manager.

I tried OS’s Explore. Here is my own shared route.

A couple of things quickly became evident. The mapping area is really small. The maximum scale is much lower than what we’re used to elsewhere. Map drawing tools are very rudimentary, and you can’t edit submitted routes. You can’t import routes. You can’t export routes. By-now standard web-map conventions such as using the scroll wheel to zoom aren’t supported. Mapperz has his own list of limitations.

In sum, if this were a private initiative, I’d refrain from reviewing it, as it would compare unfavorably to the competition. But this is tax-payers’ money at work, so the larger question needs to be asked: What is a government agency doing entering a market niche that is serviced much better and for free by the private sector?

The other prominent example from the past few years is France’s government-funded Géoportail. Both France’s IGN and and UK’s OS focus on providing a closed, proprietary portal to their data. OS then hopes that a crowd of users will add value by adding walking and cycling routes to it, as if this will make up for the fact that we can’t make our own route sharing sites from the base data via an API.

The only thing IGN and OS should be doing is focusing on their mandate to produce the best publicly available GIS data for their respective countries, and making it available in a manner that benefits its citizens (and the rest of us) maximally. I’d argue it should be for free, but if not, then at least make the data available for licensing on terms that make sense in the 21st century, where maps are enjoyed by the billions, not by the thousands.

Just as Géoportail will never be as good as Google Earth, Explore will never be as good as Google MyMaps. Spend our money on getting us better base maps to mash up, not second-rate walled gardens.

(1) Just to clarify, although OS is a “trading fund”, and thus is self-funding, much of the raw data it has a monopoly on is gathered by local authorities at public expense.

Now that Valery Hronusov has his Google Spreadsheet code tweaked to create KML for Google Sky, he has put it to immediate good use: Cataloguing nearby stars.

Here is his Google Spreadsheet showing the nearest stars to the Sun, sorted by class. By using the CONCATENATE function, which let him plug the table’s values into a KML template, Valery has made a series of network links that brings this data into Google Sky. And yes, should he change the data, the network link updates immediately.

He used the Nearby Stars Database as his source, and in doing so discovers yet another use for Google Sky:

Also I fixed 6-7 bugs in the data source in this process. GE Sky is a very good tool for checking and comparison of data from different sources.

That’s because until now, there was no easy way of mashing up astronomical data on top of an accurate background dataset. That’s precisely what Google Sky lets you do.

And while we’re on the topic of interesting content for Google Sky, check out this post on Google Earth Community, where syzygy has been “astroreferencing” (as opposed to georeferencing) NASA’s Astronomy Pictures of the Day against Google Sky’s background layer. The improvement in detail can be enormous.

Just what I was looking for to illustrate an upcoming post: HeyWhatsThat has posted an improved dedicated planisphere for Google Sky, with plenty of display and animation options. Take it away Michael Kosowsky:

Thanks to everyone for the great reception you’ve given the planisphere.

Three additions: I’ve added the Sun, Moon and planets; you can now animate the night sky; and I’ve put together a web page to simplify the process of creating a planisphere.

To try it all out, head over here. Find yourself on the map. Select the next to last option (a full day at one hour intervals) and hit “Submit.” When Google Earth opens up with our overlays, open the “Sun, Moon, planets” layer and double-click on “Sun” to center it, then start the animation. You should be able to watch the Sun cross your horizon. (Actually, your horizon crosses the Sun; you’ll understand what I mean when you try it.)

Quick tips for running the animation: A slider appears on the top right of the window when you load an animation. Hit the big arrow to the right and stuff should move. There’s a cursor you can manually drag. Click on the icon that looks like a clock to the left of the slider to set options. More documentation here and at the planisphere FAQ.

I have early reports of things not working quite right under Vista, in particular lots of overlapping copies of the horizon and grids appearing at once. If this happens, make sure the animation slider isn’t spread out to display an interval — there are tiny arrows on top of the slider to widen and narrow the interval, and you want it reduced to just a line — and try turning off some layers. If you encounter this problem and find a solution, please let me know.

KML hackers:

• Can you dynamically change the viewpoint as the animation proceeds, e.g. <TimeSpan>’d <LookAts>? Then we could make the sky rotate around a fixed viewpoint, just like desktop planetaria.
• Any way to set the time on the animation slider when our KML loads, sort of a time analog of <flyToView>?
• Can you tie a NetworkLink to the animation slider? The idea is that if you moved the slider cursor to a particular time, I’d send you the overlays for that moment.

Enjoy, MK

While the default layers also have the positions of the Moon and planets, HeyWhatsThat’s network link has the Sun, and can be used to easily find current positions without needing to fiddle with the time browser.

After a week of sucking Internet through a straw, the connection at home here in Cairo is finally restored, and all systems are go:

• Panoramas: 360-degree panorama collection sites Arounder and 360 Cities get a worthy competitor: ViewAt.org, which has a prominent button pointing to a KML version of the panoramas and a truly wonderful full-screen mode (via the browser). What I want to know is, which of these sites will be the first to convert their panoramas to KML 2.2-savvy PhotoOverlays inside Google Earth?
• Sky spreadsheets: Valery Hronusov updates his spreadsheet-to-KML templates so that they can now also contain astronomical objects.
• Migratory bird tracks: RobinNZ CAD Blog over in New Zealand has news of the migratory Gotwit bird that flew 30,000km, tracked via satellite and with its very own KML track:

  

• Video + GPS: VeoGeo merges video with a GPS track to bring you the video, a corresponding live location on the map and telemetrics data. Fantastic! (Via Mapperz)
• Tiberium Earth: I hadn’t seen this before: Electronic Arts has an extension for their Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars game, called Tiberium Earth, wherein players are invited to model structures from the game using Google SketchUp and then upload them to Google Warehouse. Players get a modeling toolbox with common components to get them started. Here are the results. (Via Slog)

MP3 in Google Earth: GE Lessons has a tutorial up that shows you not only how to embed Flash in popups in Google Earth for Windows, but mp3 files and other Windows Media-compliant files. (This KML is currently not supported on Mac and Linux.)

• Tutorial repository: Digital Urban now has a reference page containing all the tutorials posted there to date. Quite a collection of new-media how-tos.
• RouteBuddy 1.4: RouteBuddy, a computer-based navigation program for the Mac, becomes a lot more interesting with version 1.4, now that KML import and export is supported. Version 1.3 saw the addition of routing directions, which means that the two main criticisms of this program in my original 1.0 review have now been adressed. But is RouteBuddy a must-have at $100, plus the cost of maps? The main advantage to this application remains the ability to access maps and directions when you are away from the internet. Otherwise, Google Maps does a great job for the unbeatable price of Free.
• GeoJournal: A new geocaching application for the Mac. $25.
• Steve Fossett search: All Points Blog has the search for Steve Fossett covered. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been brought into the effort, and now this story too has gone mainstream: The Guardian‘s article on the search has a remarkable datapoint:
  

  There are 129 known crash sites in Nevada, but officials estimate that over the last 50 years more than 300 small planes have disappeared in the state.

  That’s one every two months. Here’s where Google Earth’s slightly older imagery can be of use — to filter out false positives from he new imagery.

• Flight simulator tips: Google Earth blog has the flight simulator in Google Earth covered: An explanation of the HUD and some flying tips.
• Standing back for a second: That’s quite an amazing couple of weeks for Google Earth’s mind share. The release of version 4.2 generated remarkable mainstream publicity from its Sky feature, and then a week later there was another wave when the hidden flight simulator feature was uncovered. Such a double whammy would not have happened if one of the features hadn’t been turned into an easter egg:-). And now there is a highly visible campaign to crowdsource the search for Steve Fossett using an overlay in Google Earth. What’s next?
• ESRI PR: ESRI ArcGIS Explorer build 410 gets a press release announcing its availability. Finally!