Many people first find out about Google Earth through some interesting current event in the news which is best illustrated through this versatile Earth browser. For example, millions saw Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita using GE.
Well, an enterprising company called Daden Consulting wrote a nifty little script to process any RSS feed’s headlines and guesses the location the headline is written about and puts a placemark there. They call it NewsGlobe. It apparently only puts up placemarks for stories where it can guess the location. When you click on the placemark you get an excerpt or complete copy of the story (depending on the RSS feed). If you download their default Newsglobe you get just the BBC world news feeds on different topics. Here’s their Newsglobe 
with a bunch of different BBC news feeds and a Google Earth Blog RSS feed. 🙂
Google Earth News
Taiwan Complains About Google Maps, NOT Google Earth
You may read stories about Taiwan complaining about its representation in Google Earth. But, the problem is with Google Maps more so than Google Earth. In Google Maps, if you type Taiwan, the result on the map simply says “Taiwan”, but the location is described as “Taiwan, Province of China”. Taiwan is in an uproar and wants it changed to “Republic of Taiwan”. However, in Google Earth both the map and the description simply reads “Taiwan”. One of the first to break the story was The Register, and they probably helped stimulate this misconception. So, many of the headlines are wrong unless they say “Google Maps”.
Garmin Buys MotionBased
Garmin, the largest maker of GPS systems, has announced it has acquired MotionBased Technologies, a popular developer of software and web based applications for GPS devices. This was a significant move for Garmin, because their application MapSource mostly provides the most basic functionality for manipulating your GPS device tracks, routes and maps.
In fact, I’m surprised I had not discovered MotionBased myself. According to their blog in the 15 months since they released their first beta, they grew to over 11,000 customers and 150,000 activities (by this I assume they mean GPS tracks). They emphasize fitness applications like mountain biking, running, and hiking. But, it can also be used for any other activitiy where you might carry a GPS. Their applications basically make it easy to upload your GPS tracks and be able to visualize the tracks against maps; analyze and chart your elevation changes, speed, and duration; and many other tools for analyzing your trip/run/bike/etc.
The Ants Go Marching One by One
The Google Blog released a story today by Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences about his web site Antweb. This web site would normally be of interest mostly to Entomologists, providing specifications and specimen photographs of those sometimes pesky little critters known to most as “ants”.
What is interesting is that Antweb has created a network link to access their georeferenced data for where specimens were collected in Google Earth. And, actually its kind of interesting to browse the numerous links around the world and click on a placemark to see if there is a picture. You then follow the link provided to the Antweb web page and you may see high-magnification specimen photos. Some of these ants look like they belong in an alien scifi horror movie.
This is definitely worth a download, but be forewarned. They have a huge number of placemarks and they download all of them for the entire world at once. It may cause your application to get slow for a minute while downloading and viewing placemarks. I would suggest they use a view-based query link to show just the placemarks for a smaller area of the world you are viewing. Still, this is an amazingly good application for use with Google Earth. Way to go bug guy!
Oh, and the bug guy was so glad to get help from Google with his project that he named an Ant after them: Proceratium google.
~12 Million Google Earth downloads? Where’s Mac/Linux Versions?
As a new kind of browser, Google Earth has certainly set some records in terms of growth. Unfortunately, Google isn’t releasing any numbers. Several people have speculated based on the statistics at the Google Earth Community Forums. Right now there are:
- 164,467 total registered users
- 102 registered online
- 1683 unregistered online
Typically, there are 15 to 20 times the registered viewers in the forums who are unregistered. From this, we can estimate there are conservatively 15X the registered users who use the forums. This equates to 2,467,005 forum users. But, one can assume there are many people who don’t even use the forums. Let’s say there are only 5X the forum users who have downloaded Google Earth: that leaves us with a guess at more than 12 Million Google Earth downloads. GE has been out as a beta since June. How long did it take Firefox to get to greater than 10 Million? Is this 12 million user guess reasonable?
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