Google Earth Layers rich information
I often go out and look at the stars. Sometimes I take a telescope or binoculars — astronomy’s a hobby. Every single time I spend more than a couple of minutes gazing at the night sky I see at least one satellite whizzing by: north to south, south to north, west to east, there’s always a little dot somewhere speeding overhead.
Some of those hundreds of satellites, and other sources, contribute images to Google Earth.
If you’ve already downloaded and experimented with Google Earth you may have looked for your house or workplace, or checked up on the neighbourhood. Depending where you live you may see a highly detailed image, or one that doesn’t allow you to zoom in very far.
For example, I can zoom in from an initial 11,000 Km viewpoint to about 150 metres above the Beehive in Wellington and still see details of the building. On the other hand, there’s a whole chunk of the Hutt Valley missing: view it from any closer than 50 Km height and all you see is big, blocky pixels.
Layers on Google Earth.
Google Earth offers a great deal more than views of your house from the air. Layers of information are available — photos, movies, descriptions, roads, buildings, weather, news reports, and other special content.
First go to the View menu and show the Sidebar. Several panels appear on the left. At the bottom of the Sidebar is a Layers section. Open up the Gallery item and check the boxes beside Google News, New York Times and YouTube.
At the top of the Sidebar is a Search box. Try searching for ‘cyclone nargis’, ‘myanmar’ or ‘burma’ for example. Google Earth takes you to Myanmar and displays numerous icons for YouTube and other content. Click an icon to watch a video inside Google Earth. A small ‘newspaper’ icon appears near places that are mentioned in Google News. Hover over any icon to see a News headline. Click the icon to see more details in a pop-up window. Details may include text, links, images.
If the icons are all piled up on top of one another zoom in to see them spread out.
Global Awareness.
Just reading about what’s going on in the world doesn’t always touch us very deeply — photos and videos make a more lasting impression. Google Earth brings together rich media around various locations under the heading of Global Awareness as a way to explain issues and reach out to the public.
Open the Global Awareness subsection, under the Layers section of the Sidebar, and double click one of the items, for example, Jane Goodall’s Gombe Chimpanzees or USHMM: Crisis in Darfur. Make sure you check the box beside the item to enable icon display. Google Earth goes to your chosen location and presents numerous icons. Click icons to view further information, including blog posts, images and other rich data that presents a coherent view of the topic you’ve chosen.
Often the content that is displayed provides further links to information available on the web.
Or perhaps check the ARKive: Endangered Species section under Global Awareness and the ‘travel’ to New Zealand. Read about the endangered Kokako, for example.
More Earth Features.
There’s much more to Google Earth than spotting your own house from space. Explore the Layers section to find out about the world we live in.
Then open your web browser and visit both KML Gallery and Google Earth Outreach.
At the KML Gallery you can download tiny Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files that overlay graphical information on Google Earth, for example, a visual representation of world oil consumption or world population density.
Google Earth Outreach:
Gives non-profits and public benefit organizations like yours the knowledge and resources you need to reach their minds and their hearts: See how other organizations have benefited from Google Earth Outreach, then learn how to create maps and virtual visits to your projects that get users engaged and passionate about your work.
Google Earth is an exciting, free piece of software. Use it for fun, entertainment, education and awareness. But keep in mind that it requires a broadband Internet connection.
Written by Miraz Jordan for, and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, June 2008.
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June 13, 2008 No Comments
News now in Google Earth
Google LatLong let us know that Google Earth has now teamed up with Google News to create an informative ‘mashup’ — Extra! Extra! Discover the world’s news in Google Earth:
… Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide. Zoom into areas of personal interest and peruse headlines of national, regional and, when fully zoomed in, even the most local of interest. From school menus to global warming, there is now literally a world of information at your fingertips.
To activate the Google News layer, navigate to the “Layers” menu on the left-hand side of Google Earth. Expanding the “Gallery” node in the layers tree will expose the “Google News” layer. Check the box next to the Google News layer and start zooming into the places on the globe in which you’re interested. Each story is represented by a Google News icon on the globe. Clicking on the news icon opens up the news story’s snippet, along with links to learn more about the event.
It’s only logical really, but shows the power of what we can achieve if useful tools are allowed to work together cooperatively.
How can your organisation make use of this new view of world news?
[Via : @MiramarMike .]
Caution: experimenting with the techniques described in this post may lead to the ‘loss’ of several hours. You have been warned.
May 21, 2008 No Comments
Why Americans know less than ever about the world
I’ve long been disillusioned with news and current affairs as brought to us by traditional news sources. I find them generally lopsided, lacking in analysis, and just generally untrustworthy.
But maybe we’re not as badly off as the Americans (how would we know?).
— Miraz
Watch this shockingly informative 5 minute video from TED by Alisa Miller called Why we know less than ever about the world (requires broadband):
Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why — though we want to know more about the world than ever — the US media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs.
May 16, 2008 No Comments
Twitter’s role in relationship building
Julie Starr, in talking about how news organisations are using Twitter, mentions how important continued Twitter use can be for building relationships:
Twitter is quite an intimate communication forum. Over time you make acquaintances and become increasingly interested in hearing what they have to say, what they’ve been reading, and enjoy having conversations with them. To have great lumps of news headlines dumped in the middle of all this is an intrusion. A couple of headlines here and there is fine, but a lump isn’t.
[Via The Evolving Newsroom: Less is more when updating news on Twitter.]
April 18, 2008 No Comments
People want to engage
Julie Starr, in talking about News services, mentions how important it is to give your visitors the ability to engage with you:
Community, like it or not, is the future. Digital citizens are not happy just looking at your news website and using your services in a static way. They want to be able to engage. To tell you what they think of your service, to make suggestions (which are sometimes very good), to talk to each other about news stories (and your service). If you don’t give them the chance to engage, they’ll give up on you eventually and go somewhere else. These ideas are well articulated in a couple of books I’ve read recently, if you’re interested: The Cluetrain Manifesto and Wikinomics. The Wisdom of Crowds also comes highly recommended.
[Via The Evolving Newsroom: Radio NZ gets it right, again.]
Although she’s specifically talking about News, I think what she has to say holds true for all kinds of services and organisations.
In our part of the world attitudes have shifted away from an old top-down approach where someone tells us what to do, say, think, how to behave. Now we are increasingly wanting to interact, to share our opinions, to challenge established authorities, to influence what goes on around us.
In real life we’ve been ‘talking back’ in this way for decades. Now we’re wanting to carry that approach across to the web, and to organisations we might not previously have thought to talk back to, such as news organisations.
It’s no longer sufficient for community organisations to have an isolated, informative website. Websites need to make it easy for visitors to interact, to share, to discuss with peers, to engage.
What do you think?
February 24, 2008 No Comments
