Grasshoppermind

This is a neat little trick with Flickr. Erik Kastner has put together this tool to Spell With Flickr. You type in the text that you want spelt out, his code goes and finds the right pictures to match your letters.

A little while ago I asked SRI International what had happened to their Digital Earth project. This project was one of the primary reasons that we now have Google Earth, Worldwind, Virtual Earth, etc., and I was interested in knowing a little more about the history. Well, Aaron Heller, who is a researcher at SRI, responded and pointed out this publications list as well as this bit of background:

SRI’s Digital Earth effort was funded by DARPA under a few different research projects over the course of 10 years from 1992 to 2002. The final report shows just how much of what is Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth, NASA Worldwind (and more), was originally done on the Digital Earth project. After 10 years, DARPA felt that their work was done and it was time let NGA take over geospatial research. NGA’s approach to is to support work in setting interoperability standards (as with the Open GIS Consortium) and working with commercial companies to develop products that NGA can license and use (e.g. Keyhole, which became Google Earth).

Some of the numbers from the final report are pretty impressive, for example, their proposed Digital Earth allowed for a scaleable tile based distributed storage system that could cope with color imagery of the planet at 1cm resolution requiring 1 petabyte of storage. This is way more that you currently can see on Google Earth and its rivals, although it probably indicates the kind of capabilities enjoyed by the intelligence agencies even now.

They also envisaged a number of different “Geoweb” Clients:

Text Based: …in addition to entering a search criterion, the user would also enter a location for the search. This could be a latitude/longitude coordinate or, more intuitively, a street address or a feature name that can be translated to a geodetic coordinate by using a gazetteer service…

Map-based:…a client that lets users search over a particular geographic region and return the results as a map image with various icons overlaid…

TerraVision: …allows users to navigate in real time through a 3-D graphical representation of a real landscape created from elevation data and aerial images of that landscape…

Geoster: … lets users index photos from around the world and share these with the rest of the world…this type of client could produce a large interest in geographic search…

You should recognise todays descendents easily.

Following up on the Sony Rootkit story, as predicted there is already significant fallout for Sony. There are Lawsuits filed against them, Virus writers are exploting the cloaking technology that was employed, Sony’s own patch appears to cause stability problems and now the anti-virus vendors are releasing removal tools. All in all this has been no doubt been a very interesting week for Sony’s PR department! If they want to do further damage to their reputation they can press ahead with the release of this copy protection scheme in Europe.

As of the time of writing there is no official press release from Sony about this, you can check here at Sony’s official press release area.

The Isle of Man has received the first commercial HSDPA network in Europe allowing islanders to download at speeds of up to 1.4Mbps. But that is of course just the start as the network is upgradeable and as such they could be seeing speeds of 10Mbps by 2008! [From 0Gravity]

The Isle of Man was also one of the first countries with a 3G network. It’s size and easy access to UK lends itself well to small technology trials of this nature. Let’s hope that the proposed takeover by Telefonica does not stop this from taking place.

There are many reasons that I choose to live on the Isle Of Man. Here’s one of them.

Unemployment has fallen by 14, which brings the jobless total down to 563. [from Isle of Man Online]

Yes you did read that correctly, that’s 563.

Found at Mobiledia, Google have released yet another beta.

Combining directions, maps, and satellite imagery, Google Local for mobile is a free download that lets you find local hangouts and businesses across town or across the country — right from your phone.

Google Local for mobile works with most Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones. You don’t need a GPS enabled phone! The downside (for me at least) is that it’s a US only service at present.

Google are really getting into this location thing aren’t they…

I wonder whatever happened to SRI International’s Digital Earth project? Now that ESRI, Worldwind and Google Earth are up and running, is the project dead?

Jonathan Stott has created this Location Finder for finding the Latitude and Longitude of any place. Navigate to the location you are interested in via a Google Maps interface, double click on the map to place the cross hairs, then click on the Location button. Lat and Long are displayed, along with the OS reference for good measure. Easy.

Jonathan has also created a couple of related services you should check out as well.
The Height Finder: Displays the hight of the location selected.
Sunrise/Sunset Times: Does exactly what it says on the tin…

Finally, Jonathan is also working on a PHP coordinate conversion utility called PHPcoord:

PHPcoord contains the following features:

* Calculate distance between a pair of latitudes and longitudes
* Convert between an OSGB grid reference and latitude and longitude using either the OSGB36 or WGS84 data
* Convert between UTM reference and latitude and longitude

Mark Russinovich who runs Sysinternals has posted an outstanding example of computer forensics. After discovering a Rootkit on one of his own computers, he set out to determine how it got there. The cause of his problem? He played a copy protected CD (from Sony) in his computer. It turns out that Sony’s implementation of the DRM copy protection scheme breaks computer misuse laws in several countries! I suspect that the fallout from this story is going to cause a huge problem now for Sony. Go and have a read of the comments on his post and you’ll see what I mean.

With Google of course! Here’s a quick tip from Mark McLaren’s weblog. When Mark first wrote this post on July 23rd 2005 there were only 5290 KML files found, as of today there are 165000. That’s an amazing growth rate.

Found this amazing journey from the edge of the universe to the smallest discovered particles. The blog commentary is in Japanese?, but the commentary on the images is English.
Warning: lots of pictures, so possibly long load time.

Can I have geo with that please?
There has been such a lot of buzz about Google Earth, Mapping Hacks, Location based services and Geo ‘Everything’, that I think it’s time for a quick list of definitions and related links to benefit those who are new to this field. Please feel free to add comments if I’ve missed anything, or you have a link to a better definition.

Please note: this post is regularly updated with new information, please check back again. If you would like to add something to the list, please comment. Last update 10th Nov 2005.

Geoadvertising

adverts displayed in the geospatial/mapping world. [from Geobloggers]

Geoblogging

attaching location metadata to blog posts resulting in articles being associated with a specific location or locations.

Geocaching

Geocaching is an outdoor sport that involves the use of a Global Positioning System (”GPS“) receiver to find a “geocache” (or “cache”) placed anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small, waterproof container containing a logbook and “treasure”. Geocaching is a unique take on an earlier game called Letterboxing in that it uses two recent technologies, the GPS and the Internet. Participants are called geocachers.
[from Wikipedia]

Geocasting

1. In networking - Geocasting is the delivery of packets to nodes within a certain geographic area [from arxiv.org]

2. podcasts associated with geographical coordinates

Geocoding

the process of assigning geographic coordinates (e.g. latitude-longitude) to street addresses, as well as other points and features. With geographic coordinates, the features can then be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems (GIS). [from Wikipedia] [Google]

Geolocation (Geotracking)

1. the technique of determining a user’s geographic latitude, longitude and, by inference, city, region and nation by comparing the user’s public Internet IP address with known locations of other electronically neighboring servers and routers [from Linuxjournal]

2. A method of determining a location of a mobile-station (cell-phone, mobile phone) [US Patent 6950664]

Georeferencing

1. A GIS term to describe the process of scaling, rotating, translating and deskewing an image to match a particular size and position.

2. Synonym for Geotagging [from Stephan at Ogle Earth]

Geospam

location based SPAM. In map based interfaces, popular locations may attract Spamlinks [more on this at Geobloggers]

Geotagging

the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds or images. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude and placenames. [from Wikipedia]
[Google]

Geotargeting

advertisements targeted at a specific geographical region, area or location. [from Masternewmedia]

Geovlogged

a tag proposed by vlogmap.org for identifying geotagged video clips

Geovlogging

Videoblogs linked to geographical coordinates

Geoweb

The internet incorporating geographical metadata or location based references. [From the Geoweb blog]

I recently asked Rev Dan Catt of Geobloggers to add a date filter to the output from his site. I had a few reasons for the feature request but I don’t think I could put it as well as this…

…What happens to all the stuff we leave anchored to physical places but floating in virtual space year after year?…
…Think about all the tourists that come to take pictures of the Duomo, once they start tagging their pictures with that location, we’ll end up with thousands of pictures tied to that place. Now imagine that ten years down the road, someone visits the Duomo, would that person be able to say, find the photos their father took at that location?…

Better still, broaden geotagging out past just pictures. Include recordings (podcasts?), articles, impressions, diaries, emotional responses, videos, poetry, literature, related links. I want a rich, multi-sensory experience linked to a location with a history. My location aware device (of the near future) will be able to present this to me as I choose.

The developers of Tagzania have been busy adding new features since their launch earlier this year. One of their latest offerings allows you to easily paste maps into your blog or website. This is useful if you want to display the location of an article you are referring to. You can also resize the map to fit your site easily, e.g.

Although you probably won’t want to go smaller!

On September 8th, I wondered when geograph.co.uk would provide KML output of their incredible photo database of almost every square kilometer of the British Isles, so you could browse via Google Earth.
Well Barry Hunter kindly pointed me at a few links back then, but now things are a whole lot easier to use because of this page. Use Geograph with Google Earth.

A couple of weeks ago John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing advised his readers thus:

Look, I’m not going to waste too much time trying to convince you that people are searching for every kind of business, right there in you hometown, using the Internet. Every major search engine is rushing to become the next local phone book and you need to get your business listed now, while it’s still free.

So, without further ado, can Google Local, Yahoo Local and MSN Local let the rest of the world (outside the US) register their businesses?

Please?

Whew! it’s been a busy few days since my last post. I’m in the middle of setting up my own business and this has required a lot of my attention. A LOT! If anyone ever tells you that putting together a business plan is easy, then they are lying…

Over at the Google Earth Blog, Frank Taylor asks whether people are Making Money via Google Earth. Well I’m not sure that there is sufficient take up of Google Earth to replace web stores (yet). But several insights in his post resonate with me.

-Firstly, Google Earth lends itself brilliantly to location based items. I used an example of this in my earlier post Howto geotag anything. I created a Tagzania account to list several items for sale that were relevant to my location (Isle of Man). Once the KML file is opened in Google Earth, you will see some links to DVD’s and Books etc. If you click on these, you get taken to Amazon using my affiliate links. (I used ElfURL to keep the links nice and manageable)

- Secondly, The Network Link in Google Earth allows that content to be dynamic. If I add additional items for sale in my Tagzania account, these will also be displayed next time you open up Google Earth. The Network Link IS the Killer App of Google Earth

The main problem is that first someone has to find your Network Link and then load it up in Google Earth. If Google Search adds KML output for geotagged items, then we’re in business!

How about it Google?

Updated: Added link to KML file

During one of my foray’s into the history of geotagging, I rediscovered this article by David Weinberger (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame). Many of the things that David was talking about back in January 2004 are becoming real. If you’re interested in all things “geo“, it’s well worth reading in full.

The GIS industry is now breaking out of its box. The technology, data representation, economics and security-driven needs for real-time geographic information are coming together. Businesses are becoming location-aware, making existing processes more efficient and enabling new processes and new relationships to emerge.

But something even bigger is happening.

Thanks to the constellation of technology that enables digital networks to be laid over the places of the earth, wherever we are we will be able to hear the human conversation that has occurred about that place – the history that occurred there, the aesthetics to be savored, the commerce transpiring at that very moment, recommendations offered by strangers and friends. The mute places of the earth are being given voice, and the voices are, of course, ours. Meanwhile, the places themselves are becoming digitally alive and are noting our presence, too.

Andy Fowler created a Google Earth script that displayed geocaches via Google Earth. Andy’s script was well written and was responsible for raising awareness of geocaching. Given the massive interest in Google Earth, it would seem sensible for geocaching.com’s owners to encourage innovation like this. However, Geocaching.com have asked Andy to cease and desist.

Clueless.