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Ok, I've been hinting on this blog in various posts I've been up to something. And, things have not been slowing down enough for me to write. So, let me at least explain in general terms what I've been up to and how Google Earth will be involved.
A few years ago, my wife Karen and I bought a sailboat and took our kids sailing around the Caribbean (see Google Earth visualization of that trip). My wife and I thought cruising and exploring by sailboat was such a great idea, we planned to do it again when our kids moved out for college. In fact, we decided we would sell our house, buy a new boat, and live and sail around the world for five years. Guess what? Our kids (who are twins) are starting college right now. And we just bought a new sailboat! I had to sail it from the Bahamas last week, that's why I had Mickey writing blog posts, the boat doesn't have satellite communications - yet.
Using Google Earth these past three years has only intensified our plans for the trip. First, to help us explore places we want to go. Of course, we want people to be able to see the places we go and will post Google Earth maps of our route and destinations. Since for three years I've been writing about the multitudes of different ways Google Earth can be used, plans have been made for some really cool Google Earth content coming from our circumnavigation. Real-time tracking, using Google Earth for nautical charts, geotagging photos, GPS tracks when we go ashore, aerial photography, and more (see a test run here). In the coming weeks, I will be sharing more about what is planned in those areas.
For five years, we will be geo-blogging our trip and leveraging Google Earth and many other tools to share our experiences. In addition to Google Earth Blog, there will be a new blog dedicated to the trip. The plan is to continue Google Earth Blog - although, I will get some help to keep the daily flow going. We won't be departing until sometime next year (originally it was going to be November 2009, but we may move that up a bit). We're very excited about this trip, and I'm also excited to share with you the plans I've been cooking up to leverage Google Earth to make following our trip an experience in itself!
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Last May I published a video demonstration of a cool iPhone application I saw at Where 2.0 which looked like Google Earth. The video demo was such a huge hit, Earthscape - the company who made it - quickly made it into a product you can now buy at the Apple store (available for $10). I purchased the app a couple of days ago and have just now had time to make a new video demo:
A couple of things to note: Earthscape has a 3D terrain model for the Earth, and they have high resolution satellite or aerial photos for some areas - especially in the US. But, you won't find as much high res data as Google Earth. They have included a "Wikipedia" layer which includes placemarks to places from Wikipedia which when clicked on provide a summary of the related site. In the earlier demo I saw last May, they had the ability to use the iPhone accelerometer to tilt and rotate. But, the released app doesn't include that feature. Tom Churchill, CEO of Earthscape, told me they found the UI was confusing to some people. But, they hope to put the feature in an update to the app in the future. Given the limited utility at this time (no KML support yet, no search capability, and no accelerometer support), I'm not sure how many people will buy it for $10. But, it is a cool app to see on the iPhone. I hope it inspires Google to port a version of Google Earth to the iPhone (if they haven't already been working on it for months).
Here is Earthscape's video demo of the new application.
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One of Google's documentation engineers, Josie Wernecke, has written a book which will be released this fall. It's called "The KML Handbook: Geographic Visualization for the Web". Notice the "for the Web" part - the book is not just focused on its applications for Google Earth - or even the new web-based Earth API plugin. It will be a guide to developers using KML for any applications of KML. The book will be published by Adison Wesley, and should be available in November. Here is O'Reilley's Rough Cut on the book.
Josie has been a writer of technical publications for graphics applications for a long time. I remember years ago when she wrote the book "The Inventor Mentor" which was a guide to using application tools for OpenGL while she was at Silicon Graphics.
via Let's push things forward.
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Google's environmentally focused non-profit has produced an excellent Google Earth visualization 
which shows information on geothermal energy available in the US. It's part of a web site Google has produced on Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) which is being touted as a possible answer to long-term electrical energy needs on a vast scale - a Googol even. The resulting KML file is really excellent. It lets you view geothermal energies at several depth levels, choose 3D or flat presentation mode, and uses time animation to view the different depths. Placemarks link to more information as well.
In addition to Google Earth, the KML file they produced uses tools from other Google products like SketchUp, and the Google Chart API. And they have produced a video which uses Google Earth to present their case. Both the KML and the video are definitely worth viewing!
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I'm back from a four day trip with practically no Internet access (more details about the trip coming). I have some catching up to do.
On August 7, I mentioned the discovery of the new Geographic Web layer updates for Google Earth. I think the Geographic Web layer has some fantastic data (millions of geotagged photos, Wikipedia articles all over the planet, and more), and the new update enhances that data in quality and quantity in many ways. However, I made some comments on the change in design involving redundancy, and the new colors, shapes, and sizes. Rich Treves also comments on his Google Earth Design blog about the new changes. And he largely agrees with my thoughts, and even suggests some other design alternatives that would have kept the look more consistent to what people have grown used to with the previous design of the icons.
Google finally announced the update on August 12th and explains some of their reasoning. One thing I didn't realize is that the new Places sub-layer also includes data from the Google Earth Community as well. Not only that, but the Wikipedia layer also checks your local computer language and will show you Wikipedia entries in your language if you are one of the supported 18 languages. I like the idea of trying to integrate the different sources of information. However, if you turn on too many layers in Google Earth at the same time you can get lots of semi-duplicated information. That could be ok. But, I really hope Google puts a lot of attention into the UI for the layers into their next update of Google Earth. There's great information in the layers, but I think it can be so confusing that many people don't realize the wealth of information available. And, Google is often modifying the existing layers organizationally and from a design perspective - including the most popular ones - and this causes confusion.
One last thing, I don't think I mentioned yet - but, noticed last week - that Google added a Summer Games 2008 layer (which is really just a placemark to get you to turn on the layer) under the Places layer folder.
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EarthGamz is a new site which is focused on connecting "...people to their passion of sports through the power of place". Naturally they started by producing a way to view sports information related to the Beijing Olympics. They have created an Earth plugin so you can view their Olympics information. They have placemark details on athletes showing their home town, the hundreds (probably thousands) of placemarks are organized by country or by sport. With the plugin there are simple buttons and drop-down menus to make the selections. Also, they have marked the venues in China visible in 3D through Google Earth's 3D Buildings layer. There is also a KML file , but this file only shows US athletes - the plugin has more complete data for lots (if not all) the participating countries.
EarthGamz also has a Facebook application for the Olympics and their site describes plans to involve social networking with their sports viewing applications. They say they will have a new "Top 100 Golf Courses in 3D" application released on August 19th. I like the idea of leveraging Google Earth's technology to create sports-focused geospatial information and tying it to social networking. Their first release for the Olympics is pretty slick!
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Google Blogoscoped has raised an interesting idea: could Google use OCR on their StreetView imagery to improve the accuracy and/or functionality of Google Maps? There are a number of intriguing possibilities:
- Simply make the maps more accurate. If you can read an address off of a building, or the name of a business, you'd know exactly where to place the pin in Google Maps.
- Make text searchable. Even if a new location wasn't in Google Maps yet, you could still help people find it if they searched for the right keywords.
- Overlay translations. If you are browsing a location that isn't in your native language, Google could overlay translations of the words found in the photos.
- If Google could update the imagery more often, you could find sales, job openings and other tidbits like that. I can't imagine they could update it that quickly, but you never know what might happen a few years down the road.
Other suggestions from the Blogoscoped forums include inserting ads (maybe even overwriting billboards), or using face-detection to try to identify criminals. I think Google would face some serious opposition to the second idea (and maybe the first), but it's interesting to see the ideas that people come up with.
The tricky part to this is obviously the OCR. You've got relatively low-quality photos (at least that's what they show us), taken with a wide variety of light, at different angles, different fonts, etc. It wouldn't be easy. However, applications like Evernote with its amazing OCR can give us some hope. Google certainly has the technology and the horsepower to get this done, but I wonder if they'll try it or not?
What other cool things could Google do with this if they decided to implement it?
Mickey
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The recent conflict between Russia and Georgia has been a huge news story lately, overshadowed by only the Olympics. Taking place in a foreign, unfamiliar area, many people have been turning to online mapping sources to help better understand the situation.
SearchEngineWorld did a comparison of the quality of data in Georgia across the three major online maps (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo). They picked Microsoft as the clear winner, and Google as the clear loser due to a lack of data in the area.
Google has explained the lack of data on their LatLong blog. In a nutshell, they haven't been able to find data that is good enough in the region, so they simply haven't posted much of anything. They insist that no data has been removed for political reasons -- it's just never been there. Both Google and SearchEngineWorld agree that basic data beats no data at all, and Google is preparing to launch some new data in Georgia, as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan and "other significant regions of the world".
If you're looking for some extended data for the region, there are some good choices. Catholicgauze has posted some excellent files in the Keyhole BBS. Other useful resources include a map of the latest Georgia-related YouTube videos, a nice Google Map-based overview from Maplandia, and a large collection of information in this file on Google Earth Hacks.
If you know of other great sources for map data related to the conflict, please share them with the rest of us by posting in the comments below.
Mickey
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Yahoo has just launched their entry into the growing world of "track your location" sites with the release of Fire Eagle.
The basic idea behind Fire Eagle is to become the link between your location and the services that you want to give your location to. You can feed your location to Fire Eagle from your GPS unit, cell phone, laptop, etc, then their applications can use it for whatever task you give them permission for.
Even though it has just launched, there are a large number of sites already using it, many of which tie into Google Maps. Google Maps Mania summarizes six of them, and others include major players such as Dash and Brightkite. There's even a plug-in available for Movable Type, which powers this blog. Wouldn't it be neat to see where Frank is right now?
I think the key to an application like this will be the mobile offerings they unveil. For example, the iPhone already has a slew of location-aware apps, none of which (as far as I know) feed data directly back into Fire Eagle. A free Fire Eagle app on the iPhone would provide a quick way for a few million more users to update their location.
All in all, it seems like a solid entry for Yahoo. The reviews around the web (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, etc) have been quite positive. If you are a heavy user of location-aware services, I can see this being a great tool. If you're not, though, will it be enough to get you going?
Mickey
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Along with the standard "Model Your Campus" contest that Google held, they concurrently held a contest for students at ITSEM (The Technology Institute of Monterrey), with the intention giving an award to the best model created by a student from that school.
After 111 submissions from 22 ITESM campuses, David Gómez-Urquiza Madero and Ricardo Pfeiffer Hurtado from the Santa Fe Campus were named the winners.
You can still view all of the campus models in the Google 3D Warehouse, and you can find David and Ricardo's winning entries here.
This was their second year with this contest (see the 2007 winners), and Google has said that it will continue next year. In addition, the school plans to attempt to model all 33 ITESM campuses. Bring on the 3D!
Mickey
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