Cullompton, England
Following on from the last post describing the miraculous Explore Our Pla.net, I’ve been amazed to discover how easy it is to create a Google Earth network link that locates recent Digital Geography posts on Google Earth. Notice that I’ve started this post with my location? This ensures that the network link below will harvest the post and display it in Google Earth.
network link for Digital Geography
Instructions come from a great post by Gerado64 at the Google Earth Community
What’s going on is that the RSS feed from this blog is being converted to GeoRSS by the Geonames service Geonames examines the feed to see if it can pick out any place names. Should a place be identified, Geonames looks up the latitude and longitude, then encodes this into the RSS feed. It’s obviously not perfect, a post about Jack London for example would locate the gnarly author in Oxford Street rather than the Klondike, though clever disambiguation technology helps Geonames make an intelligent guess at the context of the place name. Explore Our Pla.net is helping to improve the natural language geocoder with a feature that lets you pass feedback to the geonames server.
Thanks Noel for the file, it works great. I followed the instructions and managed with ease to create files for other blogs.
Hi Noel
I am rather confident the geonames natural language geocoder will identify the term ‘Jack London’ as the name of a person and not the city of London. It is much more difficult with a phrase like “Blair talks to Bush, Chirac (France) on Lebanon peace force”. In this case it is not trivial to figure out whether a place ‘Chirac’ in France is meant :
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=chirac
Marc
Maybe I am missing the point here, but when I installed your network link, I get an extract from the blog entry showing, but nothing in that seems to be cliackable to take me to the actual blog post.
and yet I know I have seen markers that can be clicked to show a blog post.
I’m new to all this; any pointers to how I can integrate blog posts and Google Earth, so that the post has a marker that contains cliackable links?
Thanks
Jeremy