10 Great Car Journeys in Street View

This week the Jalopnik website used TripGeo to create an animated Street View drive of the Dalton Highway in Alaska.

TripGeo is a great widget that lets you create embeddable animated Street View journeys anywhere that Google Maps has Street View coverage. Inspired by Jalopnik, here are my ten favourite Street View journeys animated by TripGeo:

Dalton Highway, Alaska


Transfagarasan Highway

The Transfăgărăşan is the most dramatic and second-highest paved road in Romania. The 90 km of twists and turns run north to south across the tallest sections of the Southern Carpathians, between the highest peak in the country, Moldoveanu, and the second highest, Negoiu.

Chapmans Peak, South Africa


Chateau d'Eox , Switzerland


Kirkstone Pass, UK

Kirkstone Pass is a mountain pass in the English Lake District, in the county of Cumbria. This is the Lake District's highest pass that is open to motor traffic.

Millau Viaduct, France

The Millau Viaduct is a cable-stayed road-bridge that spans the valley of the river Tarn near Millau in southern France. It is the tallest bridge in the world,

Highway 1, California


Lake Como, Italy


Øresund Bridge, Denmark to Sweden

The Øresund Bridge connects Sweden and Denmark, and it is the longest road and rail bridge in Europe.

Stuart Highway, Australia

tThe Stuart Highway is one of Australia's major highways. It is the principal north-south route through the central interior of mainland Australia and is often referred to simply as "The Track".

Google StreetView Broke the Law, Say South Korean Police

Slashdot just started a discussion on a story named Google Broke the Law, Say South Korean Police.

Their summary: "South Korean police say Google was in violation of Internet privacy laws when its Street View service archived private information in more than 30 countries, including email and text messages. The country's Cyber Terror Response Center broke the encryption on hard drives raided from Google last August and confirmed that private information had been gathered, violating South Korea's telecommunications laws. Police are seeking the original author of the program, though they say it is likely to be a US citizen. Google said it stopped collecting the information as soon as it realized what was happening. 40 states in the US are demanding access to the information gathered by the mapping service in order to determine what was archived, which Google refused to hand over. 'We have been cooperating with the Korean Communications Commission and the police, and will continue to do so,' said a Google Korea spokesperson."

Friday Geonews: FacilMap.org, NOAA Bathymetry Viewer, ESRI's GeoDesign, Australia Flood Maps, GLONASS Phones, and more

Here's the Friday geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / open data front:

• A third entry in the series of the Free Shapefiles of Countries of the World, focusing this time on small countries
• Mapperz mentions FacilMap.org Beta, that aims to group together layers of various OpenStreetMap projects
• An entry on OpenPisteMap, for mountain sports
• Via Kurt, here's NOAA's new bathymetry data viewer
• There's a new offline editing plugin for QGIS
• GeoNetwork opensource v2.6.2 released
• Shapely 1.2.8 has been released

From the ESRI front:

• SS summarizes Jack Dangermond's opening talk at the GeoDesign Summitand shares a second entry named Exploring the Esri Approach to GeoDesign
• James praises for Python in ArcGIS

In the miscellaneous category:

• There has been quite a few entries on the Australian flood maps, the best one I found is from VerySpatial
• Here's the Top 10 Spatial Law and Policy Stories of 2010
• Via APB, here's DigitalGlobe's Top Ten Imagery Related Events of the Decade
• APB mentions that a Japanese Company Achieves 3 cm Accuracy for GPS
• GLONASS-enabled phones are coming in March
• Here's Cédric's seven 2011 geo predictions
• Kurt mentions the Earth Observer iOS app
• SS mentions Satellite Monitoring Employed to Prevent Civil War in Sudan, supported by actor George Clooney
• Slashdot ran a story named 'French Use Space Tech To Find Parking Spots'

Google Geonews: Geometry GM API Library, Games in Google Earth, Maps in China Update, and more

Here's recent Google-related geonews.

From the official sources:

• Google offers an entry on Mission Blue, a deep look in Google Earth at how the Gulf of Mexico region is recovering from the five million gallons of oil spilled from the BP Deep Horizon Oil Spill last year
• An entry on the Geometry Google Maps API library: "provides a set of utility functions for performing distance, heading, and area calculations in a spherical geometry, such as on the surface of the Earth, and also provides functions for handling encoded polylines."

From other sources:

• Here's a month-by-month recap entry on Year 2010 in Google Earth, but I'm surprise the Google Earth Engine is missing from that list
• The GEB also offers an entry on games built on top of Google Earth, including the new GeoGames3D
• The GEB mentions a few nice 3D models efforts: the London 3D Project, Andy Dell models and Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio
• There's also a generic entry on fixing incorrect information in Google Earth
• Google is working on keeping its Maps in China
• The Ushahidi Founder Goes to Google

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• 3D
• China
• games
• Google
• Google Earth
• Google Maps
• oil spill
• spherical
• Ushahidi

Friday Fun with Google Maps

Russia's Ruined Navy

After the collapse of the USSR, military budgets were slashed and much of the Russian navy was mothballed or scuttled. Rod Edwards has put together this haunting collection of Google Maps satellite images that capture the ruined remains of the Soviet navy.

Google Earth Bike

If you want to lose weight after the holidays you could do worse than plugging your bike into Google Earth. Instrucatables has details explaining how you can make your own Google Earth exercise cycling machine.

OSM / Cloudmade
This is a blog about Google Maps (the clue is in the title). However for Christmas I was lucky enough to be given a one time only exception pass. Which means that I'm allowed to post these three gorgeous Cloudmade / OSM maps (but shush don't tell Google):

Ratio Finder

Wee Places has produced this gorgeous map that shows locations in San Francisco with higher than average check-ins by males and females with Foursquare.

The Envisioning Development Toolkit

This map shows the income demographics and rents in neighborhoods in New York.

@oobr's London Bike Flows

This stunning visualisation of London's Bike Hire scheme displays a time-line of traffic flow at different times of the day and on different days.

Street View Happy New Year Card

Bonne Annee 2011

Digitas France have created an interactive Happy New Year greetings card with Google Maps Street View.

Using the new Custom Street View Panoramas function of the Google Maps API v3 Digitas France have added their own 3d panoramas to Street View to create a Happy New Year greeting.

The application inserts signs into the custom panoramas to give you clues as to the direction you should take. Follow the clues correctly and you will arrive at the Digitas France greeting pictured above. Digitas France even seem to have created an English language version.

Surprisingly Custom Street View Panoramas haven't proved as popular as I thought they would. Kerken Kijken met Street View is a great example of what can be created with custom Street Views. Kerken Kijken have created seamless links to their own panoramic images of the interiors of churches in a map of Utrecht.

Bye Bye SlashGISRS.org

Our site was initially launched as "SlashGISRS.org" back in 2005. A year later we moved to Slashgeo.org. If you've been with us since the beginning and you haven't updated your bookmarks, now is the time to do it since we will not be renewing SlashGISRS.org and it will expire in the coming weeks. Thank you for your comprehension!

New York Times' Mapping America

The O'Reilly Radar offers an article on the New York Times' Mapping America website.

From the official NYT Mapping America site: "Browse local data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, based on samples from 2005 to 2009. Because these figures are based on samples, they are subject to a margin of error, particularly in places with a low population, and are best regarded as estimates."

The conclusion from the O'Reilly article: "By creating a tool that is easy to use, and that is true to the original data, the New York Times opened up a new range of possibilities. The census data is a cornerstone of social statistics and studies, but without proper tools it is difficult for most people to comprehend. This example taps into the power of visualization: it makes complex information simpler to understand."

The Secret to Eating Well in Chile

Soy Gourmet

Soy Gourmet is Chile's second most downloaded iPhone app. If you don't have an iPhone, don't worry, Soy Gourmet can also be accessed from your desktop.

Soy Gourmet is a great way to search and find restaurants in Chile. You can search for restaurants by type of cuisine, price and location and view the results on a Google Map.

Registered users of Soy Gourmet can rate individual restaurants and leave comments. Registered users also receive regular promotional offers.

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Introducing Google Map Libraries

Google Maps Javascript API V3 Geometry Library

One of the initial aims of V3 of the Google Maps API was to minimise the time it takes to load and display a Google Map. However if new features are added to the API and it grows in size the load time of the JavaScript grows as well.

The Google Maps team have therefore decided to implement libraries for the API. A library is a set of Maps API features that are only loaded when explicitly requested by the application. This request is added to the call to load the API, e.g.,

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?libraries=geometry

The Geometry Library is the first library to be added to the Google Maps API V3. The geometry library provides a set of utility functions for performing distance, heading, and area calculations in a spherical geometry, such as on the surface of the Earth, and also provides functions for handling encoded polylines.

Ed Parsons has provided a good explanation of why and how you might want to use the Geometry Library in a post called 'Because the world is not flat...'. You can also examine the library in more detail in the Maps API Documentation andReference.

Via: Google Geo Developers Blog