Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • More Virtual Earth Information

    Link – Virtual Earth – Now available for Commercial Use

    First and foremost, VE is now available for commercial use. The nitty-gritty details are available from the virtual earth developer site (www.viavirtualearth.com) but, in essence, if you leave the What and Where fields visible, you can use the control provided for a commercial site for free. In Jan 2006, there will be an option to pay for use and remove those controls. Steve’s working on a demo site for this technology called www.MyFavouritePlaceOnEarth.com – catchy huh? It’s not live yet, but when it is, it’ll allow you to mark a spot anywhere on the earth (or, more accurately at the moment, anywhere in the continental US) as a significant site” and decorate it with the metadata to say why.

    Andrew Coates updates us on some information from the Microsoft PDC. Can someone explain to me how the 45 degree angle on satellite/aerial imagery is of any value to web users? Microsoft keeps mentioning it like is will change the way we view maps, but I’m just left trying to figure out how.

  • KML Home Companion 2.0

    Link – KML Home Companion (new 2.0)

    Jim Cser emailed me and let me know that KML Home Companion 2.0 is now available. The new features include
    on-the-fly Lat/Long conversion, and color picker tools. Jim is also kind enough to include the source VB code with his distribution. One thing I really like about KML Home Companion is that it is so simple to use. I’m stuck at home this morning, but when I get in later I’ll post some screen shots.

  • Ron Lake – What is KML?

    Link – What is KML?

    One could easily create a GML representation for , treating it as a GML feature. So far so good. What about using KML to represent other geographic features? It seems unsatisfactory to say that all geographic features need to be represerted using . How would we encode say a building with a polygonal extent, a number of floors, a height, a position, a type (e.g. Church, Police Station etc), and the date when the building was erected.

    Defenders of GML are begining to take a closer look at KML.

  • The Map Room on Google Earth Privacy and Security

    Link – Google Earth Privacy and Security Roundup

    When the satellite-photo version of Google Maps came out earlier this year, there was some apprehension about the impact of these high-resolution photos on individual privacy. For example, some nervousness about being able to see the car in your driveway. I’m sensitive to privacy concerns, but for the most part I think these worries are unwarranted: most individual activities wouldn’t show up on even the highest resolution photos, and the age of the photos, as we’ve seen, can be considerable in some cases.

    I’ve been on a moratorium over the past couple weeks on these Google Earth/Map privacy/security issues because nothing new has come out of any of them. Well I’ve lifted that ban temporarily to post about an excellent article over at The Map Room by Jonathan Crowe. Jonathan brings up some great new points about the difference between individual privacy concerns and state control over “secret” information. In the end I totally agree with his assertion that this is just a case of everyone overreacting.

  • Phillip Holmstrand, KMZ is becoming the geographic equivalent of the PDF

    Brilliant! Its like the KMZ is becoming the geographic equivalent of the PDF

    In the comments on Brian’s post about Arc2Earth, Phillip Holmstrand makes a profound statement that stopped me in my tracks. I think he is right on about KMZ becoming the equivalent of PDF in the geospatial world. ESRI should do whatever they can to introduce support of KMZ into their product lineup as soon as possible or be left behind. Tools like Brian’s are going to revolutionize the way data is shared on clients and if ESRI wants to be part of that, they need to step up immediately and support KMZ/KML.

  • Jason Posts Some Screen Shots of Data From A2E

    Link – Z Lots

    Here is a shot of some data that A2E is capable of rendering. I had the data scrambled so it shouldn’t make any sense, but if the data were accurate, it would represent sales prices for various master planned communities and planned area developments in maricopa and pinal counties with z values representing these prices as percentages in height.

    Take a look at the screen shots he posted and tell me you aren’t excited about A2E? On top of all this we’ll get to see the Exporter API that Brian will allow developers to use in any ArcGIS application. The possibilities are endless with A2E and it should solidify Google Earth as a GIS viewer.

  • GlobeXplorer Buys AirPhotoUSA

    GlobeXplorer Acquires AirPhotoUSA via PubSub

    Wow, I know these two had announced a “strategic” agreement back in January so I guess that was the start of something. This probably makes sense in that it strengthens GlobeXplorer in the United States, but I’m a little sad to see a local company get bought.

  • geoTorrent – Distributing Large Datasets via BitTorrent

    Link – geoTorrent.org via Very Spatial

    Sharing huge datasets can be difficult given the bandwidth constraints. BitTorrent has always been a good solution and now we have a website “clearinghouse” of huge datasets. The only drawback is the only available image types are ECW and JPEG2000. I’m not too high on such compressed formats, but at least it is something.

  • Brian Flood Talks About Arc2Earth

    Link – Arc2Earth – ArcGIS to Google Earth Conversion

    Here’s a quick update on the GE/GIS conversion front. While there is still work to be done, significant progress has been made on the ArcGIS to Google Earth converter which is now known as Arc2Earth. While there are several other KML converters out there, Arc2Earth is different in it’s scope of conversion. Instead of just raw data, A2E leverages the fact that the ArcGIS platform is a great authoring environment for traditional maps. In addition to data, it also includes cartography, renderers, labeling, feature identify functionality, ad-hoc graphics, as well as other MXD specific features that help enrich the user experience exported to the KMZ file.

    Brian has a detailed post on Arc2Earth which should make converting maps made in ArcMap to Google Earth much easier. I’m very impressed with the user interface Brian has and it should allow just about anyone to share their maps via Google Earth. I can see this totally blowing up since there is no good tool from ESRI to share ArcMap documents. Google Earth will become the default free viewer for GIS and Arc2Earth could become the tool to make that happen. Great work Brian!

    Bflood kmz

  • Why I hate Advertisers

    I’m just amazed at how this blog has really taken off during the past 3 months. In that time the traffic has soared and in turn advertisers have begun to take notice, much to my chagrin. I got an email from one who wanted to buy some banner ads on my site. He sent me some graphs showing me how popular the site has become in relationship to existing GIS or mapping blogs.

    Graph1

    Graph2

    First of all, to compare this site to The Map Room is laughable. Anyone who pays any attention to the internet knows that Jonathan’s site is cited by more users than almost any other GIS or mapping website out there. Plus anyone looking at that graph the advertiser sent me can see that The Map Room has had high traffic levels for much longer than I have (6 months to a year). I think he added that graph in there to make me feel better about the site.

    AllPointsBlog is a little different, but I’d guess they are still much larger than this one. Something happened to the site when they changed their URL. Somehow it became less compelling than before, but maybe they are still trying to figure out what the blog should be. On top of that, changing their URL probably affected the results. This blog compared to Directions Magazine probably shows a more accurate picture of AllPointsBlog.

    Graph3

    I’ll say here what I told this advertiser, I view this blog as a hobby, not a source of income. His choice of graphs, using Alexa and the time period he picked was all part of a plan for him to try and make money off of my site with ad. The whole advertising thing is suspect anyway. When I was involved with previous sites, they would always give good reviews to big advertisers and I got so sick and tired of it I left and created Spatially Adjusted. (I’m not saying every site that accepts ads has an agenda by any means)

    The cost of this site to me is very low (I pay about $5 a month for hosting and my copy of Movable Type was paid for over a year ago). I don’t like ads on websites (I block most of them using FireFox anyway) so I’ll never have them here in any capacity. I also will always have full RSS feeds so you don’t have to even visit my site if you don’t want to. Also by the end of the week I’ll have an email subscription set up so you can follow the news via email if you don’t like RSS.

    Oh, MapInfo better watch out because I’m about to pass them in traffic! (rolleyes)

    Graph4