Earth Album is a gorgeous Flickr and Google Maps mashup. Very simple and produces many superb images.
Oct 112006
Sep 092006
Can it get any better? Well now that EditGrid supports charts in the latest version, I’m unable to think of any improvements. The legendary Valery35 has continued to push the possibilities with KML and his recent spreadsheet examples can plot point and line information in Google Maps/Earth as well as graphics in Google Earth (although to be honest it’s all getting a bit hard for me to follow)
Aug 232006
Thanks to Geography 2.0: Virtual Globes for news that excellent online spreadsheet EditGrid now has an official add-on that supports the creation of KML for spreadsheet data. This means that spreadsheet data can be displayed on a Google Map or Google Earth.
Online spreadsheets lend themselves to all sorts of collaborative projects, whether sharing weather data, fieldwork measurements or any other kind of spatially located information. EditGrid is very student-friendly and intuitive to work with, as the following demonstration shows.
I have created a open spreadsheet which is dynamically illustrated below (i.e it will update when the data set is edited.)
Online Spreadsheet by user/juicygeography.
Feel free to edit and contribute to the spreadsheet, click the “done” button and observe the changes in the map below. I would be interested in ideas for potential projects. Note that the spreadsheet requires longitude and latitude in decimal format. Here is an online converter. Many online maps, such as Multimap will output coordinates as decimal degrees to save the hassle.
The spreadsheet can also be seen in Google Earth.
Click here for the file.
Note that you’ll need to refresh the network link once loaded in Google Earth in order to see any changes to the spreadsheet. (Right-click on the folder and choose ‘refresh’)
I wonder how long it will be before Google Spreadsheets adds similar functionality? There are other free online spreadsheets, for example IRows which offers a chart function. EditGrid remains my favourite for several reasons. It’s very easy to use, there are several options for exporting the data and publishing to web pages. Judging by the EditGrid blog there’s lots more features to come soon, including charts (yay!) EditGrid is open source, free to use and a triumph for the developers.
Jun 092006
Google Earth blog has recently mentioned the upgraded Panoramio photo sharing website (see article). I’ve just had a go at playing with the new upload and mapping features, and I’m very impressed at the ease with which photos can be geotagged. Once in Panoramio, photos are available in Google Earth via the Panoramio network link.
click to enlargeI recommend Panoramio as a very classroom friendly application. It’s currently the best way of getting fieldtrip and case study pictures into Google Earth.
Tagzania exploits the web 2.0 phenomenon of tagging via a superbly designed site, that lets you add tags and other resources to locations, via the Google Maps interface.