• Minimap sidebar for Firefox:
  

  The Minimap add-on gives you a suite of in-built maps and mapping tools for your web browser. Create and save a sidebar map using the addresses or address links you find on web pages (highlight then drag and drop), or by manually adding locations. View traffic Info, drag and drop kml files, local search, Google, Yahoo and Live Local directions, view in google earth, tagzania, platial, geourl and many more. Address/Location points are stored locally for later use.

  It’s remarkable how sophisticated web mapping tools have become over the past two years.

• R for geospatial analysis: Screenshots showing visualization of spatial data analysis using the statistics tool R and its maptools package, which can export to KML.
• Hanke interview: Datamation has an interview with John Hanke. A teaser:
  

  People can have community sites about specific topics and, with this phenomenon of the long tail, you can have people aggregating around their specific interests and doing annotations around that and sharing them. And if [Google Earth] is going to be viewed as a single map, you need to have a standard so you can search and browse it. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of siloed information. [Hence KML => OGC]

• New geocoding app: I don’t know how I’ve missed it until now, but GeoXtract by Terra IMS is a standalone Windows geocoding application that takes spreadsheet data and outputs it as a Google Map or KML — to your own website, hosted on GeoXtract.com or to your local hard drive. Here is a gallery of examples. The basic version is free, and Mac support is promised. Very cute Web 2.0 site design to boot. (Via AnyGeo)
• Nokia N95 mashup? Set your Nokia to take time-lapse photography or video, attach it with duct tape to a kite, and voila, the easiest DIY aerial imagery yet. Until the landing, that is.
• Multitouch history: Because next year everyone will be surfing Google Earth using multitouch on our iPhone, here’s a overview of the history of multitouch systems by one of the early innovators.
• KML on iPhone? One blogger and iPhone owner reports being able to load a KML file published to the web in Google Maps on iPhone. Can anyone replicate that feat? By dint of a geographical misfortune, I’m cruelly deprived of iPhones here in Sweden.
• GPS with Java: Are you a Java developer? Check out gpsdings 0.2, a Java command line tool for extracting GPS data from a GPS receiver.
• How do you spell relief? Microsoft Virtual Earth 2D maps get shaded relief, reports the Map Room. With hindsight, that’s an obvious improvement for a mapping service, and it looks great.
• Michael Jones article: Google Earth Blog points to a paper by Google Earth CTO Michael Jones outlining some of the big-picture thinking that’s going on at Google regarding the (geospatial) organization of the world’s information.
• Dresden in 3D: Google Earth Blog also flags the news that Dresden is now available as a network link of 3D buildings.
• TITAN does KML: Leica TITAN now “supports the direct publishing and serving of geospatial data to Google Earth,” says an email to registered users, as All Points Blog notes.

Mark Mulligan, Reader in Geography at King’s College London, has been gathering an incredible collection of KML geography layers, but until recently did not have the server resources to make them public. That’s changed, so here they are, below.

I’ve only had a limited time to play with them, but what’s obvious is that these layers are highly detailed, thorough and labyrinthine. Check out the Amazon layer, for example: There is visualized information available both at the regional level and at specific hyperlocal places (with some highly detailed aerial photography).

Geographers and university geography departments should take a close look at this collection, as there is sure to be plenty of material here that is useful for their own projects. Perhaps other geography departments could follow Mark Mulligan’s lead and publish their own geographic resources — to help inform the public on the current climate change debate, but also to enthuse future generations of geographers…

Here is Mark’s outline of the available layers

These are public domain environmental data aimed at improving the information (raw and visualised) available to the scientific and conservation communities. The data are freely accessible to all for non-commercial use. Some of the data have been on a slow server for more than 18 months but I have been unable to publicise them until I improved the server capacity, which I have now done. Many of the datasets are works in progress and comments or contributions are welcome. The data are visualised in Google Earth and, in many cases, links to the actual downloadable GIS files also provided. Region based network links are used so zoom in to see the information. I list the main ones here with the ones most relevant to the user community listed first. Another couple of very large ones will become available within the month. All can be accessed through this list (where future databases will also be added) but each also has a shortcut URL as indicated below:

The data are held at King’s College London, Department of Geography:

www.ambiotek.com/places [online] – 5 million geographic features (places etc from the GNS, editable with ‘geowiki’)

www.ambiotek.com/landandwater [online] – 30m resolution outlines of coasts and water bodies from the shuttle radar topography mission

www.ambiotek.com/sealevel [online] – 90m resolution near global analysis of coastal indundation (sea-level rise) scenarios under different levels of sea level change, based on the SRTM data

www.ambiotek.com/seasons – [online] animation from the MODIS blue marble new generation at full resolution (500m pixels) – showing the impact on vegetation and snow of the passage of seasons over the earth and more or less cloudless colour consistent imagery

www.ambiotek.com/topoview (collaborative with the CGIAR) [online] – 90 m hole filled shuttle radar topography data and visual overlays

www.ambiotek.com/paa (collaborative with NASA JPL) [online] – the protected area archive – historic (1972-2007) false colour satel;lite imagery for global protected areas (natural colour version online by end of july)

www.ambiotek.com/amazon (collaborative with INPA) [online, growing] – a pan amazon database including annually updated landsat imagery for looking at land use change and other environemental issues affecting the Amazon

www.ambiotek.com/1kmrainfall [online] – a 1km rainfall climatology including monthly and annual totals, intensities and derivatives Based on data from the tropical rainfall monitoring mission

www.ambiotek.com/rainfalltimeseries [online] – near global 3 hourly rainfall data since 1998 at 0.25 degree spatial resolution including trend analysis (drying, wetting) and seasonality analysis, based on TRMM/GOES data

www.ambiotek.com/cloudforests [online] – tropical montane cloud forests distribution and threats

www.ambiotek.com/fiesta [online] – hydrology and climate of central america

www.ambiotek.com/tbs [online] – very high resolution (sub centimeter) aerial photography and other data for a unique lowland amazon rainforest research site

www.ambiotek.com/oriente [online] – oil related activity in the (western) Amazon

www.ambiotek.com/trees [online] – near global tree cover and tree cover change 2000-2005 based on MODIS VCF product

You can reach Mark Mulligan via this page.

I’m in London for the weekend to see the niece. This morning we went to the Tate Modern’s Global Cities exhibit — a social geographer’s dream and a wonderful place for toddlers to explore. It’s a bit like Google Earth unplugged: population density maps you can climb, and big glorious imagery of cityscapes on the walls. Worth a visit if you are in town (until August 27). Some pics below, but here’s the whole set on Flickr.

In Bahrain, the government of Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa for a time blocked Google Earth back in 2006 so you couldn’t see how big his and his cronies’ palaces were in a country with a chronic housing shortage. He has now just received a Scroll of Honour award from the UN’s Human Settlements Programme. What does that award recognize?

Its aim is to acknowledge initiatives which have made outstanding contributions in various fields such as shelter provision, highlighting the plight of the homeless, leadership in post conflict reconstruction, and developing and improving the human settlements and the quality of urban life.

You can’t make this stuff up. (Via …Or Does it Explode?)

Maps.google.ru goes live. The Moscow Times (a wonderful paper where I once had the pleasure of interning) has the backstory:

When Google Earth was launched in 2005, Russia was just one of many countries to warn that making so many geographical details available to the public represented a real security risk.

A Federal Security Service general said that this would mean terrorists would no longer need to reconnoiter their targets. “Now a U.S. company will do the work for them,” Lieutenant General Leonid Sazhin said.

In what analysts say is a sign of the times, however, the government issued a directive in May that effectively lifted all of the old restrictions on access to “precise geographical data.”

Great to see Russia coming round to the enlightened view. I hope India’s government takes the cue and goes next in lifting these outdated restrictions.

Isn’t it annoying when everyone and their Drudge links to an article by the Federation of American Scientists noting the discovery of a new class of Chinese nuclear submarine on Google Earth, without actually linking to the submarine in Google Earth? It’d be like mentioning the existence of a cool new website but forgetting the URL. Ogle Earth will have none of it:-) Here it is.

And as it turns out, “Panther37” on Google Earth Community identified the very same submarine as a Jin-class way back in July 2006, a year before the “experts”.

Perhaps even more interesting is that the placemarks that started that paricular GEC thread were subsequently removed, with the thread initiator commenting “I won’t go into the reasons here why”. Gotta love the Google Earth Community base layer and the wisdom of its crowds, even despite occasional (self?-)censorship.

Seven months after it was “unannounced”, Leica Titan is now available for download as a public beta (Windows only), reports GCN. So what is Leica Titan?

“Leica Titan is positioned as a social network for sharing geospatial data, whether it’s imagery, terrain, features [or] 3-D models,” said Mladen Stojic, director of enterprise products at Leica. “We assume that individuals and organizations around the world have geospatial data that they want to share. Leica Titan is similar to some of the other media-sharing applications that we have for sharing music, pictures and other media files.”

Aha, so it’s a peer-to-peer geospatial filesharing application similar to Napster of old or Gnutella? It’s a bit more than that. Yes, you can share individual files with others that are online, but the coolest thing about Leica Titan is that it lets you load up various geospatial files to your own globe, called your “MyWorld”, and then share that globe with others that are logged into the network. You’re not quite sharing the live state of your virtual globe, as you have to publish a version, but it is getting there.

But why use P2P for sharing states and geospatial files? In the case of most music and movie files, people use P2P because these files are being shared illegally, and owners of central file servers would get sued by copyright owners. In other cases, P2P makes it more difficult for authoritarian governments to control the free flow of information. Is that Leica’s justification for it’s geo-P2P solution? No:

“We’re bypassing the need for a heavyweight server application and facilitating users within the social network to immediately share data for emergency response, where they really need that data turned around rapidly as opposed to having to wait for some IT manager to upload it onto a server, publish it and then tell everyone it’s available,” said Stojic.

Couldn’t that problem be solved more robustly by putting an automated centralized file server online? Google Earth Community and 3D Warehouse serve as models, minus the permissioning. P2P scales horribly. In case of a large-scale disaster involving many respondents, is P2P really the best solution, instead of, say, relaying to a server and then multicasting? And is requiring a Windows machine such a good idea in a disaster scenario, instead of, say, focusing on a cross-platform or web-browser accessible solution?

Regardless of the merits of P2P publishing for this kind of content, I think the concept behind sharing the state of your virtual globe certainly carries a big appeal and can be very useful, not just in disaster response scenarios but when making presentations remotely, whether for business or to grandparents. Indeed, Unype 0.2 for Windows lets you share individual KML and 3D Warehouse files in Google Earth.

Down the line, however, what I would really like is a robust solution where I can reveal the contents of “My Places” in Google Earth, perhaps by having it be linked to my Google account and mirrored on Google servers (just like my Gmail, where space does not appear to be a problem), and also update live the current object of my attention, as GE Sharing does.