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Michael Jones discusses geographical context and Google’s objectives in this fascinating presentation:

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Posted by Jiajun Zhu, Software Engineer

To celebrate Street View’s one year birthday, I am very happy to announce we are bringing Street View to 37 (you heard me - 37!) new areas and we have expanded coverage in 15 of our existing areas. All in all, this effectively doubles our coverage. The new cities include:

• MA: Springfield
• NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
• NJ: Newark
• VA: Virginia Beach
• NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
• SC: Columbia, Greenville
• GA: Atlanta
• FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
• AL: Huntsville
• MS: Jackson
• TN: Knoxville
• KY: Lexington, Louisville
• OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
• MI: Ann Arbor
• MO: St. Louis
• KS: Topeka
• NE: Lincoln
• OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
• NV: Reno
• CA: Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton

Now you can stroll under the iconic Reno Arch:

Along with showing you some great metropolitan areas, I’m especially excited that we’re also bringing you 10 new parks and recreational areas:

• Everglades National Park (Florida)
• Florida Keys
• Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
• Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana)
• Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
• Joshua Tree National Park (California)
• Death Valley National Park (California)
• Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
• Sequoia National Park (California)
• Lake Tahoe (California/Nevada)

Now you can see the boiling springs in Yellowstone National Park from a very safe distance:

And last but not least, Street View coverage has expanded in 15 of our current areas: Boise, Boston, Kansas City, Miami, Nashville, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Richmond, San Diego, San Francisco, Tampa, and Tucson.

We’ve also been spending the past year working very hard to improve Street View image quality. In this push, we removed some of our oldest images, so say goodbye to odd coloring and funky geometric artifacts. The new images have better color and more consistent lighting.

Let’s revisit San Francisco City Hall:

And the skyscrapers of Chicago:

Now you can look up in all our images. But what goes up must come down, so with this release you can also look down as well. The roof of our car and the ‘black hole’ really aren’t all that interesting — now when you pan down the car is magically gone and you can see straight to the ground in most of our images!

And finally, in the spirit of getting better with age, the face blurring technology we began testing in Manhattan has been deployed for all of our imagery. Remember that all these new Street View images are simultaneously available in Google Earth and through Google Maps API.

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The incumbent is pro GIS having invested in it quite a bit. The Gary Post-Tribune describes it as “a computer mapping system similar to Google Earth that can put large amounts of information into an interactive map.”
Two others want to cut back on the GIS budget. One candidate wants “to “slash” spending on the GIS, [...]

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I told you Iran was campaigning against the use of the name “Arabian Gulf”; this time they’re accusing Google Earth managers of “knowingly or unknowingly” provoking conflict in the region. Wow. Illegal and insulting? Via Ogle Earth.

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.geo2web.com%2F2008%2F04%2F26%2Firan-accuses-google-earth-of-provoking-regional-conflict%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Iran+Accuses+Google+Earth+of+Provoking+Regional+Conflict’;
addthis_pub [...]

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Leica Titan has actually been out for a while. There is a post on OgleEarth from December 2006 when the first product was just coming out. My first try with it was not so smooth. But recent updates have gone much better.

It appears to be your standard 3d earth browser, but is oriented more towards data sharing and collaboration. It has a built in instant messanger to share your spatial data with others.

Leica Titan Globe

Search for a Place and zoom

Load a shapefile. It seems to be able to handle many different formats.

You can change feature colors (not based on attributes).

Click on a loaded feature to view attributes

You can also load photos and place notes on the Earth to send to others. Performance was not to bad, though navigation was a bit touchy and took some getting used to. It seemed to me to be a bit like ArcGIS Explorer, but without the extensibility.

Leica TITAN is available for download.

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, you can automatically assign a particular view to a placemark. But you can also set this manually when you create or edit a placemark.
In the New or Edit Placemark dialog box, click the View tab and change any of the following:
Latitude and Longitude - Coordinates for [...]

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If you are a Google Earth Pro user, you can quickly obtain the approximate address for many locations. In the geeky GIS world, we call this “reverse geocoding”. This means that you visually pick location and Google Earth Pro provides you its best guess for an address for this place.
Give it a try. [...]

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One of my favorite uses of Google Earth is to plan and scope out upcoming backcountry trips. Currently, I am plotting a overnight camping trip on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) near Mount Shasta in California. There are a number of ways to do this:
Navigate to the area - Tilt and check out [...]

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Over the weekend, a friend and occasional user of Google Earth asked me about how he could use the software with his real estate business. There are many options, ranging from the simple to the elaborate:
Create placemarks of properties - Once you create and share placemarks, clients can virtually visit listings, read your [...]

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You can create lines that appear between a placemark and the ground. Of course, this line only appears if the placemark is elevated above the Earth.
To do this, first create a placemark. In the New Placemark dialog box, enter an altitude value above zero or use the slider and check Extend to ground.
Polygons, [...]

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Over the weekend I saw this impressive Collection of Sundials featured on The Google Earth Blog. After checking out a few I wondered how many of these locations would be covered by Virtual Earth’s Birds eye imagery? Since the Collection of Sundials was represented as a KML file, it was pretty easy to [...]

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Over the weekend I saw this impressive Collection of Sundials featured on The Google Earth Blog. After checking out a few I wondered how many of these locations would be covered by Virtual Earth’s Birds eye imagery? Since the Collection of Sundials was represented as a KML file, it was pretty easy to [...]

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Building an application to work with Google Earth is pretty easy to do. This article will walk through the creation of a very simple application to capture different views in Google Earth.
To begin with, you will need to download Microsoft’s Visual Studion Express Edition for C# (available for free at http://www.microsoft.com/express/vcsharp/).
Once Visual Studio [...]

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If anyone is interested in writing your own Google Earth Control that can be embedded in your applicaiton, there is good information on how to do so using C# at Google Groups for KML.
Also, you can see delphi code to do the same thing at googleearthairlines.

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.geo2web.com%2F2008%2F03%2F06%2Fbuild-your-own-google-earth-control%2F’;
[...]

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We always enjoy seeing people use our products to shed light on global issues. One great example is the layer created by the UNEP/GEF South China Sea Project. This large Global Environment Facility project, implemented by the United Nations Environment Programme, is working to develop regionally co-ordinated programmes of action designed to reverse [...]

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