Gang of villagers chase away Google car

From CNN. "Google's ambitious plan to offer a 3-D street level view of communities across three continents hit a snag when angry residents of a UK village blocked the search engine's camera car from photographing their homes."

Not so much a "gang" as a few irate villagers. But worth noting the ever-increasing intersection between google's goal of omnipresence and personal privacy.

The same information, and a related post from the Map Room about the future of Street View.

Grass Roots Remote Sensing

Another [cool] example of getting back to basics... I think we'll all start to see more and more of this type of thing... It's not just about billion dollar satellites anymore, especially in this economy! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5005022/Teens-capture-images-of-space-with-56-camera-and-balloon.html

iPhone SDK 3.0 Previewed

Among all the cool things that you can do with the new iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) and OS 3.0, I am particularly excited about the release of the Google Map API in the SDK. This will help with webGIS mobile development on iPhone. Check out other features at the iPhone development site. I can't wait to work with the Map Kit framework. I hope it will provide the ability to create markers.

NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory Goes for a Swim

The NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory was intended to monitor carbon dioxide in order to help assess global warming.

Now it's hanging out with Landsat 6.

The rocket that the satellite was traveling on failed to separate from its payload fairing. The extra weight prevented the rocket from reaching orbit and the satellite plunged into the Ocean near Antartica. That's a $278 million swim.

Really though, it's all about Google Ocean now, so OCO probably just wanted a piece of the spotlight.

I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle

Matthew Honan's I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle article in the Wired Magazine details his experiment with geo applications on his location-equipped mobile devices (iPhone and Android):

I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible.

From this experience, he highlights some of the social and security issues that confronts a person who is very "geo-online." The article has references to various geo-applications for the web and mobile devices. It's a good reference article in the proliferation of geo-applications.

Georeferenced historic photos in Yosemite

I saw this guy present his project about revisiting sites of historic  photography in Yosemite (1980's and 1910's,1920's).  Obviously, it reminded me of our own VTM project.

Google and LiDAR

wondering how google earth creates the 3D buildings? LiDAR, of course!

NUS Library: 3D Interactive Map

GIS at its most... creative? Definitely at a micro-scale. Pretty cool project where they have esentially "georeferenced" books within a library by their call numbers.  The shelfs are referenced to an existent CAD model within a GoogleEarth/GIS framework.  The bottom line: lookup a book within the library and this model will take you to the correct shelf on the correct floor, GoogleEarth style.  They also have links like "Laptop Charging Station," "Quite Reading Zone," etc.

Google map driving simulator

 This is a really neat google-earth API -- as in, it uses Google Earth (not Google Maps) capabilities in a web page instead of the stand-alone application. This API is particularly cool because it combine satellite imagery (Google) with ma (Google), with Street view (Google), with oblique aerial photography (Microsoft) all in one view. Anyway, you have to look at it see how cool it is. Notes: 1) A very quick installation of google-earth plugin may be necessary. 2) Click "Create!" button, then "Start," and then just watch. :)

Earth, observed

Great RS imagery.  Earth, observed: a photo essay by The Big Picture from Boston Chronicle.