mapping

You're a dedicated digital professional of some kind, shackled to your desk all week. But you're a fearless explorer of the natural world on your days off. When you get ready for your next overland adventure, you can plan your route down the Shenandoah River or up Mount Everest with pens, highlighters and a large collection of topographical maps unfolded over every available surface--or you can use one little CD-ROM from National Geographic. No, you cannot plan it all out on a GPS. You need some old-fashioned know-how to go with your newfangled technology.

Assuming you have a … Read more

Stephen Shankland of CNET.com has been writing a number of stories about "geotagging"--that is, organizing photos by location. This can be done manually on a site like Flickr; you drag your photos onto a map and thereafter they stay associated with that location. This can be handy if you're looking for pictures of, say, the U.S.S. Constitution, it makes as much sense to look for photos by location as by keyword. And, if the keywords aren't obvious or unique, it may make a lot more sense.

That said, manually tagging things is a pain and, if one doesn't have obvious geographical features in the photo, it may be hard to locate them exactly on a map. So--how about marrying GPS data to the photos? It's a sound idea, it's doable, but it requires a slightly convoluted workflow as the technology stands today. … Read more

Tomorrow the Weather Channel is officially launching a new Interactive Local Maps service. If you live in a city where the weather tends to vary by several degrees while just a short distance away, this new tool lets you to scope out the lay of the land--literally. The tool uses The Weather Channel's HiRAD (High Resolution Aggregated Data) technology which pulls in its weather information from several different integrated tracking services.

Like any other mapping tool, you can search for a specific location or just browse around. You can also turn on and off various layers, similar to Google Earth, … Read more

Greer Park in upscale Palo Alto, Calif., isn't what you would call dirty.

Nor is it sprayed with graffiti, broken down, rusty or disheveled. In fact, nothing on the surface would indicate the need for a concentrated effort by Google employees and friends participating in Google's first International Cleanup Weekend, an endeavor born in part to publicize the MyMaps application and KML, the XML-based markup language used to make Google's interactive Web maps.

Yet here were eight of us, stooping to harvest bottle caps, gum wrappers and cigarette butts from the tanbark and grass at 9:30 … Read more

If you were waiting for YouTube to roll out a maps feature to browse geotagged videos, the solution has come in the form of a new Google Earth layer released today. With the layer enabled, videos will pop up anywhere you are on the map and play on the video's page on YouTube if you click the thumbnail. PC users get a slightly better experience than Mac or and Linux users, as the videos will play right inside the application.

Like other layers in Google Earth, you need to turn this one on to start seeing videos. You'll … Read more

Google has added six new cities to its Google Maps Street View, as well as the ability to pan to the top of skyscrapers.

The new cities with the 360-degree view are: Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Tucson. And the images in Phoenix, Tucson and parts of Chicago are in high resolution, like those in San Francisco and San Diego, according to Google's Lat Long Blog. There's also a dorky video about it on YouTube.

The images in the new cities were captured by Google's own camera-equipped cars since its contract with Canada-based Immersive Media expires … Read more

Google has just announced the latest project to bubble up out of Google Earth--International Cleanup Weekend, a coordinated global effort taking place Saturday, October 13, and Sunday, October 14, 2007, at locations throughout the world.

Who's doing the organizing? You are, naturally, using Google Maps to plot cleanup sites.

What began as an internal corporate eco-venture for local involvement has now been embraced by communities in 15 countries. Google Earth's outreach team is asking groups of six to 10 people to pick a modest project close to home, do it, then share their accomplishments by posting photos and videos to the team's Google Map.

Individuals can coordinate their own events or try to contact Google's partner organizations, like Idealist.org, Sierra Club, and The Scout Association in the U.K., which are urging their members to form local projects.… Read more

Google Transit has been around since late last year, and as early as this February, public transit stops started to pop up on Google Maps, alongside other landmarks and locations, indicating the service was slowly moving into the mainstream. This morning, Google Transit is alive and kicking as a "graduate" of Google Labs. You'll now find a new link on top of your driving directions in Google Maps to toggle the public transit directions, be it bus, train, or boat--assuming you're in one of the 10 U.S. cities (or Japan) with supported transit systems. You'… Read more

Autodesk on Tuesday announced it will release as open-source software a tool that can convert geographic coordinate data from one format to another. If you're not a map nut, that's the challenge one might encounter switching, for example, from latitude and longitude to Universal Transverse Mercator--or from geocentric latitude to geodetic latitude, for that matter.

The software, acquired from Mentor Software and used within Autodesk products already, supports more than 3,000 coordinate systems, the company said. Norm Olsen, Mentor's founder and the programmer who created and supported the transformation technology, will be a senior software … Read more