Kai Chi Leung at the University of Minnesota has a very interesting PDF presentation highlighting the differences between Google Maps for China and Google Maps for the rest of the world. He concludes that there is censorship in the Chinese version of Google Maps (and the omission of the disputed Arunachal Pradesh area between China and India is a clear giveaway), but notes that both versions are available in China — so you can always use the international version if you want.

That’s similar to how Google Search works in China: The local version is censored, devoid of links that China’s internet censors disallows anyway; but the international version is also available, so Chinese surfers at least have an inkling of what they’re missing.

But the justification for the censoring of Chinese Google Search has been made on usability grounds: Google said it did not want to return links that don’t lead anywhere. That justification doesn’t work for labels and borders on maps — you don’t click on them to do anything.

The more likely answer is that Google is bending to demands of the Chinese government as a price for being able to operate in the country. At least this censorship stays within China, and doesn’t befoul the international version of Google Maps.

Note that Kai’s research is only for the map view of Maps, not the satellite view. I highly doubt there is a separate version of Google Earth for Chinese IP addresses. At least not yet.

Jonathan Thompson from Humanlink writes:

Frank and Stefan-

New high res imagery for Aceh region in Indonesia and, more importantly, eastern Chad. Abéché is the main support base for aid activities in eastern Chad and Guéréda supports Kounoungou, Mille and Am Nabak camps. Still searching for other updates but for your relief worker readers these are useful.

Flickrer Dan Catt writes a long and interesting post about his early role in georeferencing Flickr photos, harking back to the days when he was running geobloggers.com as a Google Maps site for Flickr photos. At the end of the post he reveals that Flickr’s API can now be asked to return KML via URL attributes. It’s still a work in progress, but it is a welcome return to seamless interaction between Flickr and KML.

My preferred solution at the moment remains be Steeev’s Yahoo! Pipes-based KML feed. Why? Because with Pipes, I can see an arbitrary number of photos, rather than the fixed 20 photos that Dan Catt’s KML feed returns. All I need to do is clone it and change one value.

(More on Flickr + KML here and here.)

• Google buys Panoramio, the georeferenced photo hosting site with a default layer in Google Earth. Go Panoramio!
• Documentation for KML 2.2 (beta) is up. Google Earth blog has an overview of new features, Digital Urban speculates whether the new PhotoOverlay tag will allow 360-degree panorama views inside Google Earth, and also whether Panoramio will be particularly well-placed to take early advantage of this tag.
• FortiusOne’s Geocommons, announced at Where 2.0, is one application I wish I had had more time to spend on over the past weeks. Fortunately, Adena Schutzberg at Directions Magazine has given it a comprehensive rundown.
• Tobedetermined!‘s Alexander van Dijk, who has been developing a system for visualizing a Google Earth user’s perspective over time, now has a blog dedicated to the project, with plenty of eye-candy documenting his progress: UGO, User Generated Orbit
• More tricorder-like enhancements for my Nokia N95: ViewRanger, a UK product that comes with the entire UK Ordnance Survey maps loaded as well as panoramic 3D views for points of interest, the ability to track others on your own phone(and vice versa). The full version is not cheap at £150, but there is a free evaluation version, and the features do seem quite complete. Only drawback that I can see — no access to satellite imagery such as Google’s.
• Wild Sanctuary’s sound layer for Google Earth goes live. Great quality sound — I just wish I could play them from within the application — at the moment, it almost makes more sense to play them from within Google Maps. And it makes me wish for 360-degree panoramas to go with the recordings:-)
• Digital Urban is very impressed with the new 3D model of New York City in Virtual Earth 3D, and makes a salient point:
  

  If this level of detail was in Google Earth there would be a flood of posts on the web praising the next step in virtual globes, yet as its Microsoft the reception seems strangely muted.

  This is true, but at the same time I still don’t feel compelled to reboot into Windows to take a look myself, and when I examine why that might be the case, I come up with this reason: Until 3D buildings allow placemarks to be pasted onto their facades with the requisite metadata, we’re just dealing with (very pretty) eye candy. In other words, this kind of improvement doesn’t ameliorate my search experience, even though it undeniably makes for a more impressive and realistic view.

• Mac photo georeferencing application HoudahGeo is up to version 1.1.2 , bringing the ability to export directly to Flickr and lots of welcome bug fixes. It’s looking very slick now. (‚Ǩ25)

You’ve no doubt today heard about the plot to blow up some fuel lines to JFK, with three people arrested and one still sought. A friend who is stuck doing the Saturday newsdesk shift sent me this, scanned from the indictment:

In a related matter, earlier this week, plans for the new US embassy in Baghdad showed up online. The relevance of that leaked information was downplayed thus:

“The actual information that was up there was purely conjectural and conceptual in nature,” spokesman Jeffrey Willis said. “Google Earth could give you a better snapshot of what the site looks like on the ground.”

Noted! Are you listening, insurgents?

What is the problem here? Actually, neither Abdul Kadir, “a citizen of Guyana and former member of its parliament“, nor Jeffrey Willis are GIS or security experts, and neither are qualified to make such statements. It would be a pity if their opinion were to be used as “evidence” for the need to censor Google’s high resolution imagery.

From a post over on Google Earth Community, today, news of an imagery update that mentioned Antarctica. Finally, the fifth continent gets the high resolution treatment. I had to go take a look.

Yum. Mount Erebus is now in high resolution (albeit without DEM data), as is Australia’s Davis Station and Casey Station, UK’s Rothera, Deception Island (!), China’s Great Wall Station, the South Orkney Islands, and plenty of unmarked high-resolution tiles as well. Christmas has certainly come early for polar scientists. Here’s a quick collection of this new imagery (view it as KML in Google Earth).

(On a side note: Now that there is much higher resolution over parts of Antarctica, a lot of the placemarks turn out to be not so accurate — I wonder if there might not be a mechanism for assimilating/correcting these?)

Here is the official list from Google Earth Community:

New high resolution imagery:

• Canada: Whistler, BC; Waterloo & Toronto, Ontario; Nanaimo, BC; and

  Fort Saskatchewan, AB

• England: Base 50cm coverage of nearly entire country, and Avon
• Germany: Cities/Regions of Greifswald, Trier, Köln, Stuttgart, Bonn,

  Oldenburg, Rostock, Saarbrücken, Hamburg, Hannover, and Ritterhude

• Austria: Villach region
• France: Cities of Caen, Dijon, Metz, St Etienne, Toulouse and Rouen
• Spain: Catalonia and Valencia
• Andorra
• US: Imperial County (CA); Yellowstone National Park (WY); Galveston/Houston (TX); Peterborough (NH); Cheyenne (WY); Burke, Wake, and Cabarrus Counties (NC); Racine and Kenosha Counties (WI); Washington, DC; St Paul (MN); and the State of Alabama
• Japan: City/Regions of Kochi, Asahikawa, Koriyama, Miyazaki, Nagano, Utsunomiya, Akita, and Toyama

Digital Globe:

• Large Digital Globe (60cm) update includes areas in Sudan, expanded

  Africa, Australia, Mexico coverage and smaller areas of coverage in Asia, Polynesia, South America, Canada, Europe, Middle East plus some

  interesting islands in Antarctica and Greenland.

Updated Imagery:

• Americas: Bogotá, Columbia; Mission Viejo (CA, US); Hillsborough County (FL, US)
• EU: Dublin, Ireland
• Middle East/Africa: Beirut, Lebanon and Tripoli, Libya
• Asia: Hong Kong and Manila, Philippines

Updated Terrain:

• Western US 10m
• Canary Islands 10m

Frank Taylor lists some more specific places. Note also that Germany’s imagery now looks more naturally colored.

(Thanks to Alok Patel, Maria and Jan Wesbuer for writing in.)

Catching up and posting here, more for my own sake:

• One of the reasons that I have not been reporting much on Windows-only 3D virtual globes is because even though I run a Mac that can run Windows natively, 3D graphics acceleration has still required a reboot, because Parallels Desktop didn’t support that feature.

  Until now. Parallels Desktop 3, out in a few weeks, will have support for 3D hardware acceleration, which means I will be able to run Virtual Earth 3D and NASA World Wind in a window on my Mac, properly, just like any other Windows application. (Via Ars Technica)

• Boing Boing features a cat owner freaked out by the fact that her cat is visible in the window of her home on Google’s new Street View feature. She later features in a New York Times article. Point quietly made: Taking photos from the street is not illegal, but you can in any case exempt yourself using by notifying Google using the map interface.
• It was a 100% certainty that a blog would spring up documenting interesting Google Street View images: Enter Streetviewr.
• AutoCAD 2008 expands its KML toolset, including support for timelines. AutoCADder has the details and further linkage.
• Ron Lake: KML and GML Working Together. Friends again!
• An in-joke, but a good one, from the always excellent xkcd.com: