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SpaceNavigator Contest – Mickey at Google Earth Hacks has announced a contest in anticipation of the 10 millionth download of GE content from the site. The contest is to guess the date/time when the 10 millionth download will occur. The two closest guessers will when a SpaceNavigator! Check out the announcement for details.
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Excel to KML – Bill Clark, who nearly two years ago developed some great real estate tools with Google Earth for Earthpoint, has recently released a handy web utility for uploading simple spreadsheets to have them converted into KML files. Try out the Excel to KML utility here. The web page contains all the instructions you need to get it going.
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Google Geo Talk – Google has announced a couple of interesting upcoming geo-related functions. 1) they will be hosting the “WhereCamp” on May 17th, 18th in conjunction with Where 2.0 2008. 2) They are starting a Google Geo Developer Series of lectures with the first being on Feb. 20th in Mountain View with a lecture on creating KML. See details on the series at this web page. The message hints that there will be other lectures in the coming months in different Google locations so we won’t all have to travel to California to see everything. Last year there was a big Google Developer Day held simultaneously in many Google offices around the world (and with live web casts and post-lecture videos). In 2006, there was the first Google Geo Developer Day which was a big success.
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Crysis – DigtialUrban reports they have figured out how to import Google 3D Warehouse models into the popular new 3D shooter game Crysis. Read the details and see a video.
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Street View Update – In my post yesterday about different ways we could view Street View in Google Earth, someone pointed out I forgot to mention PhotoOverlay as probably the best method for viewing Street View in Google Earth (if it were available). Barry Hunter came up with an example KML
showing the same dinosaur case I used. I updated the post yesterday about this as well.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
Hi there,
Just wanted to let you know that we needed a package to convert from SHP or KML to TimeSpan or TimeStamp KML, so we released the conversion library for anyone to use, called teKML (Time-Enabled KML). There is a User Guide and API Docs for developers. teKML relies on OGR2OGR in FWTools, runs on Windows, Linux, and is Open Source.
Best Regards,
Lex Berman
Project Manager, China Historical GIS
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis