Just-announced Microsoft Popfly is a competitor to Yahoo! Pipes. From the screenshots, it looks like formidable competition indeed, and there seems to be plenty of geospatial functionality included. (As this TechCrunch image makes clear, Geonames.org’s database is provided as a resource). The beta is closed, so I can’t answer the big question in my mind: Will Microsoft manage to provide output as KML, or will it succumb to not-invented-here-ism?

On May 8, AP’s Katherine Shrader had an interesting interview with Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, director of the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) that got picked up by a number of newspapers. Murrett seems to be indicating he’d like a shift in US policy when it comes to the availability of satellite imagery in the public domain. It is well worth reading in its entirety, if you haven’t already. That article, in turn, inspired a pie

This is definitely an original use of Google Earth: Judge Allows ‘Google Earth’ To Be Used In Marine’s TrialCAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — A military judge ruled Thursday that a popular satellite-imaging program can be used at the trial of a Marine accused in the death of an Iraqi civilian to pinpoint locations relevant to the killing. [...]Military prosecutor Capt. Nicholas Gannon said each of Pennington’s descriptions of the area were “fair and acc

The twice-weekly posting frequency around here is going to have to continue a while longer, alas, though Ogle Earth’s loss is Sweden’s gain, as the world’s first virtual embassy in Second Life is beginning to look really good (even if I say so myself). The launch and press conference are scheduled for May 30, and Sweden’s foreign minister Carl Bildt (who is a real tech-head and who also writes Sweden’s most popular blog) will be cutting the ribbo

Am I harping on about mobile mapping apps too much? I think we’re just getting started — this is an area that is currently experiencing rapid innovation. Now that so much information on the web has been georeferenced, in part due to Google’s ongoing KML indexing project, it makes sense to want to access the information when you’re there, on the move, where it is most valuable. For a sense of just how fast things are moving, have a look at

Yesterday, when I had uploaded my georeferenced photos of Wadi El-Hitan to Flickr and wanted to publish them to Google Earth, I hit upon an unexpected snag: There were 31 photos in my Flickr set tagged with “wadielhitan”, but both RSS-based solutions I had reviewed in a previous post — namely Barry Hunter’s wrapper for Geonames and Mapufacture — suffered from a systemic drawback: Flickr only publishes the most recent 20 images to its

Yesterday’s trip to Wadi El-Hitan, Whale Valley, exceeded all expectations. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it, and I’ll be writing more about the experience on my personal blog. I used the day as an opportunity to field-test the Nokia N95 as well as some GPS-enabled mobile application — Mobile GMaps, GMap-Track and Shozu. My co-traveller friends thought I was a being an utter gadget freak, but I think I was able to convince them

A little way into the Sahara, about 130 kilometers southwest of Cairo, you can find Wadi al-Hitan, aka Whale Valley. Over the past 30 years or so remarkable fossils have been discovered here that provide some of the strongest confirmation yet of the soundness of evolutionary theory — namely, fossils of whales with legs that died 40 million years ago in an ancient shallow sea, just as these mammals were returning to an aquatic lifestyle. The

While trawling through my site statistics instead of going to bed, I came upon quite a catch: Google LatLong, a brand new official blog containing “news and notes by the Google Earth and Maps team”. John Hanke writes the inaugural post. Bookmark this blog, subscribe, etc… Comments (1)

Google has made available an overlay showing both before- and after satellite imagery of the town of Greensburg, Kansas, devastated by an F5 category tornado on May 4. You can find an animation of the radar imagery that night here.Comments (3)

At a dinner party tonight, somebody mentioned that half of all Dutch people had used Google Earth. I was incredulous. “No, it’s true, I read it on the internet” was the reply. A quick Google later, indeed here is the article in Emerce, in Dutch, dated April 17. 47% of Dutch people have used Google Earth, according to Dutch search engine specialist Checkit and researchers RM Interactive in an annual report they’ve conducted since 2002 on internet

A project for the brave (or foolhardy) among us: DIY GPS adapter for a Nikon DSLR. (Via Photojojo!) And if you thought that was easy, maybe it’s time to build your own OpenSourceQuadroCopter, a four-rotor remote-controlled flying machine that can act as a base for both aerial photography and video. (Make Blog has a great photo.) The FlickrExport plugins for iPhoto and Aperture gets an update. For a while now they send embedded EXIF data to Flic

Jan Besbuer in Zumala, Spain, has just downloaded a new build of Google Earth. It’s version 4.1 (4.1.7076.4458 on the PC) — and I while I can’t download it yet for the Mac from where I am, Jan has included some screenshots with his own commentary, below: First notice: It has “Tip of the Day” And Watch in Google Maps Button Two more new things: GE-Plus licences can now be deactivated. Tours are now playing much smoother. Time to ob

Sean Gorman at FortiusOne writes they had an “overwhelming urge to launch something” in anticipation of GeoCommons and they’ve come up with pollmappr — “syndicated, geographically aware polls” where the results are displayed in Google Earth according to geographic region. It looks great, is thoroughly web-2.0-ified, and is kinda addictive: The real challenge becomes thinking of a question where the geographic location of the voter is lik

John Bailey at the Alaska Volcano Observatory & Arctic Region Supercomputing Center sent Frank Taylor and I an information-packed email with heaps of stuff that is bound to be relevant to Ogle Earth readers, so I’m posting it here verbatim, embellished with just a few extra links: I’d been meaning to email you with a few things that might have flown below your radar (not that much does), and in a couple of cases people have beaten me to it:New S

Wow, that’s five whole days without posting. I could plead all kinds of extenuating circumstances, but that would take too long:-) Better to just post all the interesting new stuff from the past week anon:Twango is a media-uploading service that you can email files to (including from your mobile phone) and geocode via text in the message body. The results are now available as network links — your own personal ones, and aggregated ones too.W