[Cross-posted from the Official Google Australia Blog]Australia is home to many geographical treasures, and the Great Barrier Reef has to be one of my favourites. There's a magnitude, a depth, and a diversity of marine life that just leaves me in awe of this ecosystem that stretches more than 2,500 kilometres along the Queensland coast -- from Bundaberg up to Cape York.You can now use Google Maps to find and explore the largest reef system in the world. Through close collaboration with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority,...
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
Friday, 26 September 2008
On October 20, immediately following the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, CA, the Google Earth Outreach team will be conducting a special one-day intensive hands-on training on Google Earth and Maps. Google Earth Outreach helps non-profit and public benefit groups put their data online in a geographic context using Google Earth and Maps. Workshop participants will explore several exceptional examples of how Google's mapping technology has improved non-profit outreach and communication with the world, and has effectively impacted policy and public...
Looking Back, Moving OnOn Saturday morning, we gathered our belongings and headed to the Nome Airport for our flight back to Anchorage. Our load was somewhat lighter, since we'd given each high school a Gigapan camera kit so that they could add their own panoramic images to Google Earth. We'd gathered a few souvenir coffee cups, t-shirts, and postcards along the way, plus a colorful certificate I plan to frame and display proudly in my office: We now belong to the Arctic Circle Club, Point Barrow, Alaska (71° 17" North 156 ° 47" West) and are fully...
Thursday, 25 September 2008
In the spirit of this week's launch of transit info for New York City, here's a tip on how to get the most out of the trip-planning feature, especially if you live in a suburban or rural area without dense transit coverage. Try adding "station" to your search term; for example "huntington station" instead of just "huntington". This should help make sure we show any available routes, and is especially useful if you're commuting to a transit station by car, bike, or other means.Posted by Raphael Leiteritz, Product Mana...
We are happy to announce the launch of Google Map Maker in seventeen more countries, extending to many countries in Asia such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, and Mongolia - covering close to half a billion more people. With every launch, we hope that Google Map Maker continues to empower users to bring their local knowledge and passion for their neighborhoods to the collective endeavor of creating great maps, especially in countries for which there is a lack of comprehensive local information.We'd...
The monsoon floods along the River Kosi continue to challenge the resources of the relief agencies in the Bihar region of India and in Nepal. To assist with the relief efforts, and to keep people around the world up to date, we have pulled together some mapping resources.Fresh ImageryGerman Aerospace Center (DLR) has published some maps and images of the flooded area, and these have been processed into KML image overlays for easy access by anyone. To view them in Google Earth, click here to download the KML file. This...
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
One of my passions is kitesurfing and as many of us enthusiasts know, Cape Town, South Africa is one of the best places in the world for the sport. Interested in checking it out? Curious about the conditions? Searching for "Kitesurfing Cape Town" will immediately show you the best places to go as well as provide you with photos from Flickr and Panoramio and videos from YouTube, all of which prove why South Africa is one of the best places in the world for this sport. Check out Andries from Cabrinha landing a 80 foot jump here and you'll see what...
This week the Google Earth Education team is announcing two science outreach initiatives. Both are part of our effort to increase educational outreach and expand upon the successful workshop we held in Boulder at the University of Colorado in the spring.Google Earth ConferenceIn partnership with the University of Michigan, we are co-hosting a conference focused on exploring science data visualization in Google Earth, Google Maps, and KML. The Scientific...
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
Over on the Official Google Blog, we've got some pretty big Google Maps news: we've added transit data from the largest agency in the country, New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority. You can learn more about this newest addition at maps.google.com/nyc or read more about this launch and the history of the project on the Official Google Blog.Posted by Chris Harrelson, Tech L...
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Nome After a short flight from Kotzebue, we landed in Nome in pleasant weather and caught a cab to our hotel. Our cab driver wistfully mentioned that he had just arrived home from Fairbanks, where he had played his last round of golf for the year. A university vehicle awaited us at the hotel and we discovered that our cab driver is also the mechanic who had just serviced our borrowed rig. He is an example of a phenomenon quite common in small Alaskan towns, where many people display numerous talents and fill a variety of roles within their...
Saturday, 20 September 2008
Kotzebue: guns, drugs and helicopters Now that’s an attention-getter! What kind of crazed situation did the Google Geo Education group get itself involved in? I'll get there soon enough, but first let me spend some time providing the back-story. Kotzebue consists of a little fewer than 4,000 people and is on the up-and-up, having gotten all of its roads paved within the past few years (the asphalt serves as effective dust control compared to the previous gravel-based roads). My entry into Kotzebue started stressfully enough, as our airline had...
Friday, 19 September 2008
En route from Barrow to Kotzebue In order to get from Barrow to Kotzebue you need to fly all the way back to Anchorage first, so Wednesday was a travel day. We spent our layover refining our lesson plans, so I thought I would share the activity I've been presenting in classrooms this week. I call it “Our Changing World: Using Google Earth and KML imagery overlays to visualize change over time." The Earth is a dynamic planet that is not static...
It's hard to believe but we've turned one year old! It's been an incredible year for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. Since our launch in September 2007, we've been joined by an amazing array of visionary teams from around the world in pursuit of a common goal: to return to the moon. Haven't had a chance to meet the teams yet? Well, you're in luck, because you can check them out via our cool new KML. You'll get to know the competitors and preferred partners, get a sense of their motivations, be able to check out some conceptual images, and even see some...
Thursday, 18 September 2008
Clean Up the World Weekend is scheduled for September 19-21. Conducted by cleanuptheworld.org in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme, Clean Up the World Weekend is a global initiative that encourages people to come together to clean up and fix up local parks, beaches and trails. Google is serving as the technology partner this year, providing Google Grants funding as well as consulting services for the My Maps and Google Maps API components of the site.Gather some friends and be one of the thousands who are working today to...
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
BarrowThe flight from Fairbanks was a nice one, not too much out of the ordinary except that the front of the plane was blocked off to hold cargo, and the back half was reserved for passengers. The only way to get goods to Barrow, the most northern point of the United States, is by plane or by barge. The scenery between Fairbanks and Barrow was beautiful to say the least. First there were tall evergreens poking through fires of yellow leaves coating...
Over on the Google Mobile blog, you can read all about some exciting new additions to Google Maps for mobile. You can now get even more of the Google Maps features you've grown to rely on --including Street View, walking directions, and business reviews -- directly on your phone. Here's a video showing the new Google Maps for mobile release in action, and head to the Mobile blog to read more.Posted by Ryan Pollock, Mobile T...
From Fairbanks to BarrowOur first full day in Alaska started out at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center’s Discovery Lab. To get there we descended to the lower depths of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Rasmuson Library. This location is fitting, because the D-Lab, as it’s known, feels a lot like a cave – a cave from the future, that is. The room is dark except for a huge 3-walled screen, onto which you can project all kinds of interesting imagery. It makes for a very immersive environment, and the lab has been used for projects ranging...
Monday, 15 September 2008
Three days after Hurricane Ike slammed into Galveston, Texas as a Category 2 hurricane, severe flooding has challenged Gulf Coast residents from Texas to Louisiana. A team at Google has been gathering information we hope will be useful to residents of the affected regions and the relief agencies working to help them.Imagery from NOAAAfter Hurricane Ike came ashore in the wee hours Saturday morning and as the weather cleared, NOAA's Remote Sensing...
Greetings from Fairbanks! I’m writing from the Discovery Lab at the University of Alaska, where members of Google's Geo Education team have just kicked off a series of workshops with educators and students who are interested in learning more about how Google Earth and Maps can be used in the classroom.It’s hard to believe that in just a few hours we will be in Barrow, the northernmost inhabited location in continental North America. From there we’ll be going to the communities of Kotzebue and Nome before...
Friday, 12 September 2008
Thursday, 11 September 2008
As an update to the Hurricane Layer we launched last week, we've added some additional data to support the approach of potentially dangerous Hurricane Ike. The folks at Weather Bonk have once again provided us with Webcam data in Texas. Look under the "Hurricane Season 2008" folder under "Weather" to see "Hurricane Ike Webcams."Many of those webcams are in the Houston / Galveston area and illustrate the road conditions present in the current mandatory evacuation. The folks at weather.com have also provided us with...
Sometimes it takes more than a list of directions from Point A to Point B to get you where you need to go: you need to know what stands in between you and your destination. To get an idea of what to expect when you hit the road, click on the "Traffic" button on the top right when you get your directions (it will appear if we have traffic coverage in your area) -- and remember, you can see either live conditions or typical conditions at any given day and time. Here's a quick cheat-sheet about what exactly the colors indicate:If a road...
We have launched Google Map Maker in Haiti and Cuba in order to help relief efforts in the wake of recent natural disasters, including Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. These maps and data are urgently needed by U.N. agencies such as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and many other responding organizations as they navigate the complicated logistics of delivering food and supplies to the region.For those who are familiar with Haiti or Cuba and want to lend a helping hand, we urge you to help map these countries....
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
Summer is my favorite season. It's warm and sunny, there's plenty of fresh fruit as a treat for my sweet tooth, all the extra daylight makes me feel more productive, and of course there are summer trips. This summer, a lot of transit agencies reported historically high ridership. To help people to easily plan their trips, many transit agencies have turned to Google Maps to integrate their route, schedule and stop information.In fact, in the few months since our successful Earth Day Challenge, we've launched another big batch of new US...
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
As usual, great detective work everyone! I am continually amazed that the blogs out there answer all the questions and find many of the updates I didn't even reference!Here are the answers to the quiz, followed by a more complete listing of areas updated.1) Often referred to as The Cape, this land mass is technically an Island.- Cape Cod, MA2) The happiest place in Europe has been updated.- Disneyland Resort, along with the rest of Paris3) A major tourist attraction and host of an annual film festival, this city has gotten the star treatment.-...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
