Short news, angry edition: Good and bad tutorials… and a missing island

  • John J. Gardiner, Google technical writer and blogger at Google Earth User, has a couple of new tutorials out on the official Google Earth Tutorials page.
  • While we’re on the topic of Google Earth tutorials, what the hell is this? I think it is either a flytrap for catching email addresses to spam (“Also included with your free membership are exclusive benefits only our members get”) or else an attempt to garner Google juice for some nefarious purpose later. The content is either generic or else copied wholesale from Richard Treves’ excellent series of KoKae screencasts.
  • Mentioned by commenters but not yet in a post here on Ogle Earth: Tiles2KML is another superoverlay creator, joining Superoverlay and Super Overlay Tiler. My only concern: The home page sports bogus 5-star ratings banners. Ew.
  • It’s understandable for Google Earth to miss out on brand new islands. Less so when the island in question is one of the most important cultural heritage sites in Europe. I want my Skellig Michael. (Don’t look for it here; here it is instead in Virtual Earth)
  • Because the Belgian military is afraid of Google Earth, Belgeoblog‘s Pascal Laureyn created a placemark collection of all Belgian military bases. Where did he get the pointers for his dangerous placemarks? From a list of addresses on the Belgian military’s own website.
  • Got coordinate data in a MATLAB file? This script will export it to KML for you.
  • In a post on Geobloggers, Rev Dan Catt shows how Flickr really gets the geospatial semantic web: Support for different microformats in HTML, support for GeoRSS, and geocoding from a URL are all steps that make life easy for savvy users and casual programmers. Make these people happy, and gaining market share is a downhill battle. (Better late than never, Via The Map Room)

One thought on “Short news, angry edition: Good and bad tutorials… and a missing island”

  1. Talking about Tiles2KML…

    I would not trust them – They send spam.

    And their site not only has those banners, but also a lot of spelling mistakes (Decemebr, secrure). Full professionality ;)

Comments are closed.