A very quick post, as quite liturally I don’t know what else to say but WOW.
See for yourself: http://maps.google.com/?&gl=us
Click the “StreetView New!” tab, by the map type switcher. Click one of the Camera icons to zoom to a supported city, and drag the little guy onto a blue outlined road, and well enjoy!
… so when they going to bring that vehicle over here then?
(via GEarthblog – link above from the comments as it doesn’t seem to be rolled out fully yet)
Wow, Google have again gone and introduced an almost draw-dropping new feature to Google Maps – Mapplets. Put simply they allow you to create mini-map-mashups, but as they run on maps.google.com, visitors can view your content along side the normal content of Google Maps – but even more interestingly visitors can load more than one Mapplet at a time, combining the data from each mashup onto ONE map!!!
And it turns out they are really easy to code for been based on Google Gadgets (which I haven’t used before) and Google Maps API (which I have 
), but I also congratulate Google on including in the package ‘Developer’ mapplets that make developing relatively painless.
Anyway onto the demos, just visit http://maps.google.com/preview (it’s a Developer orientated demo for the moment), click the ‘Mapplets’ tab, goto ‘Add Content’ and see what takes your fancy. To try out my (very humble!) demo, use the ‘Add by URL’ and paste in the following URL: http://www.geograph.org.uk/stuff/gmapplet0.xml
(more about maplets in the post linked in the first paragraph!)
Spured on by comments on Stefan’s Ogle Earth blog, have created this little page as a wrapper to the excellent service provided by geonames.org to automatically convert a RSS feed to KML. It also does RSS->GeoRSS and GeoRSS->KML.
http://www.nearby.org.uk/rss-to-kml.php
Hopefully should make it a bit easier to load a (Geo)RSS feed into Google Earth in the style of a RSS feed – it auto updates.
… really need more to talk about, been kinda quiet of late…
A quicky: Nice little tweak of the 3Dconnexion control of a Google Map demo, thanks to an undocumented parameter it turns out it is possible to enable the Smooth (continuous) Zoom function from code, so now a new demo that has it enabled
As before IE only and required all sorts of hoop jumping to enable the activeX – but hopefully it worth it – still want to try the bookmarklet approach of loading this into any map.
Thanks to Frank for letting us know about the new SDK for the 3DConnexion devices, including the SpaceNavigator, I’ve been waiting for this for a while as wanted to try it for websites like Google Maps. Even nicer is the SDK includes a Javascript demo – so makes developing for Google Maps Easy!
Enough already, I want to see the Demo!
WARNING: Internet Explorer – and you might have to enable ActiveX controls to run. Do so at your own risk! I won’t intentionly do anything bad, but can’t promise that 3DConnexion won’t (but doubtful they would either) – Recommend you add Nearby to your trusted sites and then allow controls to run in the trusted zone.
Or just download the file to your local drive. (right click the above link and select Save As) and run it from a local file – didn’t have to jump thought the hoops to get it to run there!
Todo: The zooming isn’t as slick as it could be (possibly) and would be nicer to have more control of the speed. Also the silly (depending on your point of view!) warnings from IE7, which I wonder if there is a better way of loading the objects to make it more compatible.
All hail the new GGeoXml class, just introduced into the Google Maps API! Now you can easily (usually 1 or 2 lines!) add content that you have in KML/Z or GeoRSS to a Google Map in your API page.
This is the same functionality that has been on the main Maps site (well the GeoRSS support is new!) for a while: nice for this to migrate to the API.
TIP: to try it don’t forget to use &v=2.x in your api loader to get the latest version that includes the GGeoXml.
To celebrate here is a Geograph Demo – following some testing will make it an official feature.
If you have Google Earth version 4 and broadband then you might be interested in clicking this link:
· Geograph SuperLayer ·
By opening the above link you should be able to view the whole Geograph image collection directly in Google Earth. This has been possible in a number of ways for a while, but this does so in a much more compelling way (i.e. a single small download!).
This exploits the new Region functionality of GE4 to only fetch and load detail as you zoom in, in this way the view starts depicting a course overview of the current coverage, zooming in reveals more detail until pictures themselves become visible. (the ‘Super’ is adopted from Google’s term of SuperOverlays – overlays that load via nested regions)
In particular this is all pre-compiled and compressed, so should be fairly quick to download and is friendly as possible on bandwidth. Overall the layer consists of 102,965 files at 450MB compressed so there is a lot of data available, however you will download a lot less than this, probably on the region of a couple hundred files totalling about 2MB in a typical session.
As a small refinement, when a icon represents a single photo (a camera icon) if a view direction is stored the icon will have the top point in the appropriate direction. Also once the thumbnail is visible you can double click the thumb and the View will rotate to orientate the photo correctly!
Also this is only the first version, hot off the presses, so it not perfect yet, in particular would like to use Geograph specific icons (any Graphic Designers reading???), for example to give more feedback to the user on squares with many images, and view direction – also GE sometimes gets confused at the amount of detail available – plan to experiment to see if something can do about that.
… Hopefully users of GE3 should degrade nicely to use the View-based refresh method of viewing the dataset.
Oh and yes this is the little kml project I mentioned, see also other ways of loading geograph data into Google Earth or Google Maps via KML files.
Following the addition of GeoRSS, earlier today while out photographing some PhotoSpots (TBA), I had an even better (possibly) idea, now that my WordPress stores Lat/Long, why not output KML too! The icing on the cake is you can also wrap it in a NetworkLink so that peoples Google Earth will auto update. (I am surprised couldn’t find this done already!)
And if that isn’t enough then I also release the code under GPL – note its the first time written anything for WordPress, so might not be a tidy as could be!
Anyway see it in action on my series of PhotoSpots:
As a Auto Updating Network Link 
Google Earth KML file- as all these list the PhotoSpot category, each post includes a link to open the actual spot, so just click the world icon in the balloon to open
Download the Source or view the source: WordPress KML Generator and NetworkLink Wrapper
Installation: This is not a proper plugin, so just drop the .php files into the root of your WordPress folder and you should be done (but you can configure the icon to display if you wish by editing the wp-kml.php file)
Use: Normally you would only provide a link to the Wrapper – which in turn links to the feed itself, but the feed is useful like in the above example to plot directly on Google Maps. You can also specify a particular category to display like the above example or otherwise will include all geocoded posts.
Important: Requires the GeoPress extension be installed (to get geocode info)
Only tested on WordPress 2.0.1 – Works For Me – Your Mileage May Vary – no guarantee, implied or otherwise
In one of those duh! moments, I suddenly realised the ironicness of the nearby blog not being GeoRSS enabled.
So now thanks to the wonderfully simple but powerful GeoPress WordPress extension, feeds are now GeoRSS talking, however this has only really been of any use (which probably why not done before) on the recent PhotoSpot mini series where the blog post is tied to a location!
It also allows a minimap to be embeded into the post, I’m not so sure on benefit of that in my case so have put one in the last post to see how it looks…
Also taken the opportunity to install Akismet plugin to help trap spam, I have my own very simple capatcha that means I only get about 4-5 a week anyway.
Update: also found you can get a (Geo)RSS feed of a particular category, so can could subscribe to the photospot series.
I found an interesting hidden feature today, you can link to Google Earth by location, by using a little re-director on Google Maps, this works for postcodes, addresses, and even coordinates. Of course its quite easy to write such a re-director and I use one, but using Google’s should be more robust. Found via the Google Toolbar button 
Update: Experimenting with this it seems you can also manually invoke the non slick interface in Google Maps. (so, so far can found js, kml, and html do something different to normal maps interface)
Update2: over on woowoowoo‘s blog, theres an excellent idea for a bookmarklet to utalise this trick (it seems it work’s on all countries and even for directions!). I have also extended (just add to your favorites/bookmarks) said link to work without having to click ‘link to this map first’.
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