Watching a glacier in Columbia recede, or the systematic cultivation/de-forestation of the Amazon or even the growth of Melbourne is, at the very least fascinating.
Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.
Google has released a new “3D” perspective “mode” for Google Maps applications based on Flash. This gives a 3D-like experience to the 2D Google Maps (without the 3D terrain or 3D models from the Google Earth API). You can tilt and rotate the map and “fly” around Google Maps. One advantage to this is that Flash is pretty ubiquitous in nearly every browser, and requires less memory and graphics overhead compared to the GE plugin.
The interface for the new mode borrows from the GE plugin – so it should be familiar to anyone who uses the GE API applications. One thing I immediately missed for the Maps version is the middle-mouse button option to “tilt” your view. Anyway, in the post, Google lists several examples created by Maps API developers using the new 3D perspective. Here’s one of the examples:
As a Google Analytics user, chances are you know the value of good data on traffic to your website. More data means you can make better-informed decisions about how to drive traffic to your site and to your brick-and-mortar locations. But your website is just a part of your entire web presence.
Users of Google Maps and Google Search, for example, may also be interacting with your local listing on Google. While Google Analytics is fantastic for measuring traffic to your site, there has previously been no way to measure how customers interact with other elements of your web presence. That is, until today. The Google Maps team has just launched a new dashboard in its free Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc) that will provide you with information on how users interact with your local listing on Google Maps and Google Search.
This new dashboard provides detailed metrics on traffic to local listings on Google Maps — helping you understand, for example, how many times your listing appears in Google.com or Google Maps local search results, what search queries lead users to your listing, and what zip codes customers come from when they search for directions to your location. This is the first time this kind of data has ever been made available to business owners, and we think you’ll find it highly useful.
If you’re interested in learning more, head over to the Official Google Blog for a more-detailed overview or the Lat Long blog for a walk-through of the dashboard’s features.
Artist Aaron Koblin layers flight patterns on a Google map representing air traffic across the United States over a 24-hour period. The map illustrates flight paths using color and animation for all the aircraft the FAA tracked on August 12, 2008.
I remember when a Pilot named Gary Powers became world news, along with his very very very secretive spy-plane.
Now in 2009, we can just spot a spy plane from our home computer….
Bill
Sometimes the satellite images Google acquires happen to capture some really unique sight. This one is really awesome for those of us who try to find planes captured in flight in Google Earth: A U-2 Spyplane flying over Kuwait! This one was found by plane aficionado ‘Delta102‘ of the Google Earth Community. He’s found many other planes in Google Earth, but this is one of the best. NOTE: the orange colored ‘shadow’ to the upper left is actually an artifact of the satellite cameras which is caused by the plane’s motion. You see this in GE with planes and cars (the further away, the faster the object).
The new Crisis in Darfur layer, which was pushed out into Google Earth on Monday night (as first reported here), was formally announced on Tuesday in Washington, DC by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google. Google has featured this layer as a new default layer (turned on when you first bring up Google Earth). The news of the new layer was picked up by major media sources all around the world (see a media summary – with links – of major news stories at OgleEarth). Over the coming days and weeks, the millions of people who have Google Earth installed will start up the application and discover the new layer. Even more attention and learning about this tragedy will occur.
A version of this layer was first released back in February. Since February, an enormous amount of effort from people all over the world – who specialize in GIS and Google Earth content – was put forth to greatly enhance the Crisis in Darfur layer before it was released this week (see the credits at the end of this page). When the layer was released in February, it did not get much media attention. Although its truly a much better layer now than in February, it isn’t the quality of the layer which has captured the attention. It’s the fact Google got behind the layer, made it a layer turned on by default in GE – and joined USHMM in their press announcement. Now, it suddenly it gets major attention. In my opinion, if you have super-power brand name recognition, and an innovative application of information dissemination (Google Earth), then helping elevate attention to a crisis like the one in Darfur is a very good thing. My congratulations go to the team of people and organizations who helped create the Crisis in Darfur layer. But, my hat is off to Google for using their marketing power for good.
Buried in the new layers added to Google Earth on Monday, was a new sub-layer found under the Travel and Tourism layer. The new layer is the first example of a country getting a built-in GE layer celebrating the travel and tourist spots in Google Earth. The “100% Pure New Zealand” layer contains placemarks highlighting destinations, scenic highlights, and the location of visitor centers around the country. The placemarks contain beautiful photos, descriptions, and links back to the relevant main New Zealand travel web pages. Since I’ve been planning to visit New Zealand for some time, this is a great additional tool for planning.
One thing that is apparent when you compare the scenic photographs to the Google Earth views is that GE’s New Zealand terrain would really benefit from higher resolution. The photos in this new layer demonstrate that higher resolution terrain would make looking at New Zealand in Google Earth even more exciting. If I had a vote, New Zealand would be the next country to get high resolution terrain like Switzerland did in late February.
So, I’m wondering which other travel and tourism departments are going to rush to ask Google to be included? I’m sure New Zealand tourism will benefit from the additional traffic they will get as a result of this new layer.
Google Earth Blog Exclusive: The new Globe Glider has finally been released. Globe Glider first came out over a year ago and allowed you to tie a Google Map to Google Earth in an integrated fashion. The new Globe Glider goes much further than last year’s version. Now, not only can you tie together maps, but you can tie together Virtual Earth to Google Maps – OR, you can tie together Virtual Earth to Google Earth! I’m going to have to make a video (UPDATE: see the video here) to truly demonstrate how amazing this works (or you can try it yourself). You can even compare a Google Earth scene with a 3D model to a Birds Eye view in Virtual Earth of the same thing. Not only that, but I discovered you can even run the Virtual Earth 3D version within the built-in Google Earth browser and directly compare a scene in VE3D to Google Earth. The neat thing is that if you change the view in one window, Globe Glider changes the view in the other window to match.
In the screenshot above, I’m looking at the baseball stadium in San Francisco in Google Earth in the top part of the screen (with a 3D model of the stadium) and a Bird’s Eye view of the same stadium from Virtual Earth. But, the Virtual Earth app is actually running within the GE internal browser. If I turn the view in VE to the North, then the view in GE turns to the same view. Pretty cool huh?
Yahoo! has just announced they are now supporting interactive Yahoo! Maps and, even more significantly (IMHO), Google Earth’s KML format. This means you can use the powerful Pipes graphical interface to create complex queries of various web sites and, if the query includes geospatial information, you can generate a map viewable in Google Earth (or other applications). I still believe Pipes is a powerful concept, and I think adding geospatial visualization capabilities through KML is a smart move. In fact, Google’s application to make KML an open standard is probably one of the reasons Yahoo! has decided to support it. [UPDATE: Brady Forrest (of Oreilly) mentioned this in his post about the new feature.]
As part of the announcement, they show some examples. The example Pipes do show you can include geospatial information, and you automatically get a link at the bottom for a KML file. For example, they show a Pipe allowing you to search for apartments in San Francisco which are near something (like a park). You can view the Pipe, and at the bottom you get a link to a KML result. This results in placemarks of apartments meeting the criteria. Note that you can just run the KML link and it will automatically run the pipe and give you the result. One thing I would suggest is allowing the query parameters to be included as part of the network link itself, then you could dynamically change the Pipe by changing the network link. Hopefully more sophisticated KML features will be supported allowing you to add photos to a placemark description, etc. There are a lot of possibilities I can imagine for powerful Google Earth visualizations coming from this.
By sgtonkin@gmail.com (Sebastian Tonkin). [
This one was 
Yahoo! has