Where in the world is... (Answers)

Posted by Matt Manolides, GIS Specialist

Great detective work to everyone who was able to figure out what areas we updated! Here are some answers in case you weren't able to answer all of them.

Q:Two states known for their majestic peaks have gotten an upgrade.
A: Alaska was updated with new terrain and Colorado was updated with new imagery.

Q: I can now see where my favorite maple syrup is made.
A: Vermont was updated with new imagery.

Q:Certain Florida beaches (and 1 mountain) are looking much improved.
A: Orlando (Space Mountain), Daytona Beach, and Melbourne Florida were all updated with new imagery.

Q: Try counting the warthogs in the Boneyard.
A: I have yet to count them all, but check out Tuscon Arizona and try yourself!

Q: Peek inside the home of the Brew Crew.
A: Just outside Milwaukee, you can see Miller Park, home of the Brewers, with its retractable roof closing.

Q: You can read the Skin's logo painted on their field.
A: The Washington Redskins play right outside of Washington DC, at FedEx field.

Q: An historic state capitol building is now in high res.
A: Historic Charleston, West Virginia is now visible.

Q: This city was named after the Native American name of a nearby mountain, "Tacobet."
A: Tacoma, Washington is the name of the city.

Q: A "far away" city that played a key role in trans-Saharan trade can now be seen close up.
A: As the saying goes... "From here to Timbuktu"

Q:The town where Jane Austen spent her final years is much clearer.
A: Jane Austen spent her final years in Winchester, England.

Q: The topic of Vincent van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night is now bright as day.
A: This cafe is in Arles, France. It is now called Cafe Van Gogh (try searching for it in Google Earth).

Q:Take a look at "la ville noir," where Cointreau was invented.
A: Cointreau was invented in, and only distilled in, Angers, France.

Q: Only a third of this country's land is arable, but you can now view the entire country in high res.
A: Italy is now covered with SPOT 2.5m imagery.

Q: From 1880 to 1884 this German city was home to the world's tallest building.
A: Cologne is the city name you were searching for; the Washington Monument took the title from Cologne.

Q: Rockets may be used to disrupt rain clouds over this city next summer.
A: It is said that rockets will be used above the skies of Beijing to prevent rain during the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Q: This country received an impressive terrain update, you might call it Lord of the Terrain.
A: New Zealand has been updated with 10m terrain; the mountains are especially breathtaking.


For a more complete list of updates in this push, see the notes below.


New high resolution:

US: State of Vermont, State of Nevada, State of Colorado, Chenango County (NY),
Oswego County (NY), Lancaster (PA), Montgomery County (MD),
Prince George's County (MD), Charleston (WV), Frankfort (KY), Leon County (FL),
Volusia County (FL), Orlando (FL), Melbourne (FL), Ridgeland (MS), Tucson (AZ),
Phoenix (AZ), Pierce County (WA), Walworth County (WI), Waukesha County (WI),
Milwaukee (WI), Washington County (WI), Ozaukee County (WI), Puerto Rico &
US virgin Islands.

South America: Maracaibo, Venezuela

France: French Riviera, Arles, Biaritz, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Angers, Amiens,
Bourges, Clermont Ferrand, Loire River

Italy: 2.5m imagery for the entire country.

Germany: Aachen, Bielefeld, Braunschweig, Stralsund, Duisburg, Halle,
Hannover, Herten, Itzehoe, Karlsruhe, Cologne , Norderstedt, Pinneberg,
Quickborn, Recklinghausen, Rellingen, Schenefeld, Tornesch, Wentorf

Updated Imagery:
Americas: Regina, Canada; Saskatoon, Canada; Winnipeg, Canada;
Ottawa, Canada; Quebec, Canada; Chemung County (NY, US);
Cortland County (NY, US); Broward County (FL, US); Fairbanks (AK, US);
Boise (ID, US); Colorado Springs (CO, US); Aquas Calientes, Mexico;
Brasilia, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; San Salvador, El Salvador;
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Europe: Lisbon, Portugal; Madrid, Spain; Naples, Italy; Rome, Italy; Athens, Greece;
Moscow, Russia; St Petersburg, Russia; Kazan, Russia; Saratov, Russia; Prague,
Czech Republic

Middle East/Africa: Timbuktu, Mali; Cape Town, South Africa; Tunis, Tunisia; Tbilisi,
Georgia; Mecca, Saudi Arabia; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia;
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Alger, Algeria; Lusaka, Zambia; Nouakchott, Mauritania; Sana, Yemen;
Tashkent, Uzbekistan;

Asia: Beijing, China; Shanghai, China; Mumbai, India; Pyungyang, North Korea

Oceania: Melbourne, Australia;

Updated Terrain:
Eastern US 10m, West Virginia 3m, Alaska 60m, New Zealand 10m

Weekly Google Code Roundup for July 23-27th

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It has been a busy time for conferences. From MashupCamp last week, to OSCON and The Ajax Experience this week. While some of the teams have been talking to developers at these events, others have been producing new APIs for you all to use.

In API and developer-product news...

A new API was added to the AJAX Search API, Image Search.

Paul MacDonald blogged about the new features in the Google Mashup Editor, including sorting, compact paging, the new select control, and more. He also discussed various GME developer resources.

We have released a new tool that we have been playing with, the Google Singleton Detector, as open source. Its job is to find singletons and global state in the Java code that we produce.

While working on the Zvents mapplet, Michael Geary developed a nifty utility function called GAsync(). This lets you make several requests in a single call. Mike has kindly donated this function to the Mapplets API so that everyone can use it.

In other Map news, the Maps API team created utility functions to give you more information about your lines and shapes: GPolyline.getLength, GPolyline.getBounds, GPolygon.getArea, and GPolygon.getBounds.

You can also test your driving directions skills using the new directions API.

Around Google

Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility: Dan Crow explains X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers.

Computer science resources for academics: At the main Google campus this week we're hosting the Google Faculty Summit, which involves universities all over participating in discussions about what we're up to in research-land as well as computer science education - something very near and dear to us.

The newest Google Earth Enterprise: Today, we're pleased to announce the newest version of Google Earth Enterprise. The enterprise solution brings us into close contact with some of the most advanced users of geospatial tools, and by meeting their needs, it helps make the product better for everyone. And enterprise users are some of the most active in using the products and also making contributions to the Google Earth and Maps user community, with data, blogs and mashups.

Featured Projects

The BBC Flood Tracking mapplet is a fantastic example of citizen journalism. This map includes UK flood alert information, emergency center locations, photos submitted by local residents, user-generated YouTube videos, and audio clips by BBC Radio correspondents.

Jookebox is a music mashup that pulls in data from iTunes and Amazon to give you a comprehensive view of what's happening on the music scene.

Google Tech Talks

Inbox Zero is a fantastic talk by Merlin Mann, a well known productivity guru and creator of the popular 43 folders website. Merlin talks about Getting Things Done, the importance of getting your inbox to zero, and strategies for dealing with high volume email.

Erlang is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, and is grabbing developers interest due to its concurrency model. This talk will cover the history of Erlang, demonstrate major design goals with a few programming examples and also touch on the subject of the future of Erlang.

Erlang also has the best movie made about it: Erlang the movie. A real classic.

The Google Test Automation Conference showcases lightning talks by Harry Robinson, Dan North, Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce, Christine Newman, Andrin von Rechenberg, Ade Oshineye, Timur Hairullin, James Richardson, James Lyndsay, Jordan Dea-Mattson, Curtis "Ovid" Poe.

Launchd: One Program to Rule them All: In this talk, Dave, who developed launchd, will discuss the rationale behind launchd and how the program came to be.

Darfur video blog map

Posted by Carolyn Au, Google Software Engineer and a member of StopGenocideNow

StopGenocideNow is a grassroots volunteer organization that is working to halt the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Three of my friends from StopGenocideNow have been visiting refugee camps along the Chad-Darfur border, and we've put together a video blog map to help put names and faces to the people who have been affected by what the United Nations has described as one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. You can also learn more about what's going on in Sudan by checking out the Crisis in Darfur layer in Google Earth or by visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's page on Darfur.

By the way, StopGenocideNow also posed a question during the recent CNN/YouTube Democratic debate, asking the candidates what they would do to stop the genocide in Darfur. You can see the candidates' responses too.

A world built by its inhabitants

Posted by Phil Verney, Google Earth Community Development

The Google Earth Community (aka BBS) is a geographical repository created by over 850,000 local experts who are as diverse and interesting as the places they post about. Being a member requires no mapping training, just the desire to explore. It's the urge to discover and communicate with others that makes the Google Earth Community such a valuable resource, and its ability to influence people's geographical awareness encourages these everyday users to create innovative and fascinating stories of our planet.

The "Biography of Neil Armstrong" is a prime example of the way people tell those stories. Their annotations of the planet demonstrate that part of geographically organizing the world's information involves not only collecting the best mapping data sets, but also providing a geographical context for the information displayed.

Thousands of placemarks created by users form a significant part of Google Earth's layers. These represent different languages, opinions, and cultural backgrounds that all come together in an integrated "geo-browser." You can view them by turning on the "Google Earth Community" layer and "Geographic Web."



The Google Earth Community has a wide diversity of people that interact with each other daily. While some have a background in GIS, many do not -- and they are not what you would think of as "typical GIS users." For example, a French artist used Google Earth to display her works of art. She made the point to me that, while she may not have the professional reputation of some other artists yet, her ability to create a Google Earth file and show it on the community has boosted awareness of her work. And any description of the Google Earth Community is incomplete without mentioning the dedicated team of moderators who monitor posts, assist members and create a welcoming atmosphere for the inhabitants to construct.

The ability to share discoveries is part of indulging our natural curiosity. Last year, a user called 'earthling_andre' noticed what appeared to be a burning ship off the coast of Iceland. With the desire to know stimulated, members shared their research and opinions. By a stroke of luck, one member was able to help significantly. Why? Because he was the captain of the rescue vessel.

Aircraft in Flight (Aircraft that have been captured in flight by the imaging satellites and aerial photograph providers) is another great source of discovery. Every day, hundreds of planes captured in flight are found, posted, and collected. My favourite is this one of a C-5 Galaxy being refuelled by a KC-135 Stratotanker.



The BBS also acts as a portal for scientists, organizations, and developers to share their current work. Examples include the palaeogeology of Earth, the effects of Gas Drilling and for a bit of fun, we have bouncing globes and rocket racers.

And the Google Earth Community is just a small part of a much broader "Geographical Community." Anyone with Google Earth can annotate, inform, and shape the world by creating and posting a KML / KMZ (the file format used in Google Earth) to any website. With features such as Geo Search now available, great content can be indexed and searched no matter where it resides.

Where in the world is...

Posted by Matt Manolides, GIS Specialist

I'm happy to announce that we've published new imagery and terrain for Google Earth. Discovering what's been updated is a fun challenge that our community of users has traditionally been able solve with amazing efficiency. I don't want to spoil anyone's fun, but how about a few hints?

• Two states known for their majestic peaks have gotten an upgrade.
• I can now see where my favorite maple syrup is made.
• Certain Florida beaches (and 1 mountain) are looking much improved.
• Try counting the warthogs in the Boneyard.
• Peek inside the home of the Brew Crew.
• You can read the Skin's logo painted on their field.
• An historic state capitol building is now in high res.
• This city was named after the Native American name of a nearby mountain, "Tacobet."
• A "far away" city that played a key role in trans-Saharan trade can now be seen close up.
• The town where Jane Austen spent her final years is much clearer.
• The topic of Vincent van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night is now bright as day.
• Take a look at "la ville noir," where Cointreau was invented.
• Only a third of this country's land is arable, but you can now view the entire country in high res.
• From 1880 to 1884 this German city was home to the world's tallest building.
• Rockets may be used to disrupt rain clouds over this city next summer.
• This country received an impressive terrain update, you might call it Lord of the Terrain.

I think those are enough hints to get the great hunt going, but don't limit yourself to the areas I hinted at... there are many more updates throughout North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Have fun! We'll be posting answers and a complete list of updates in the coming days.

The newest Google Earth Enterprise

Posted by Noah Doyle, Product Manager, Enterprise Geospatial Products

Today, we're pleased to announce the newest version of Google Earth Enterprise. The enterprise solution brings us into close contact with some of the most advanced users of geospatial tools, and by meeting their needs, it helps make the product better for everyone. And enterprise users are some of the most active in using the products and also making contributions to the Google Earth and Maps user community, with data, blogs and mashups.

So with a goal of extending the benefits of our geo products to organizations, this release takes a big step toward embracing a broader range of users inside organizations. It provides custom database support with Google Maps-style 2D views as well as a traditional 3D view. And it seamlessly marries Google's hosted geo services with the ability to publish custom databases behind the firewall so users can enjoy the best of both worlds. And there's more -- some additional enhancements in this release include:

• Browser integration with the Google Maps API AJAX architecture, allowing 2D map views to be embedded in any web-based application, so everyone in an organization benefits from the power of Google Earth Enterprise.

• Performance enhancements amounting to as much as a 10x speedup for vector data processing and better than 2x reduction in server computation for responding to imagery requests.

• New search framework for integrating geocoding and other search services via Java plug-ins including a Google Search Appliance reference implementation.

• Regionator for creating Super-Overlays with Regions based KML and publishing them for viewing in any Google Earth client version (Free, Plus or Pro).

• Security improvements and extended Operating System support including Red Hat Enterprise Server 4 and SUSE Linux 9 and 10.

Also, many of our long-time users may welcome the many interface improvements to streamline data processing steps and make it faster and easier to create customized Google Earth (plus now Maps!) databases. Here's a view of the 'plex from the same custom database - in 3D Google Earth (top) and 2D browser (bottom):







For all these reasons, we say go forth and publish ever more geodata!

Drum Roll... The winners of the 2007 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards are...

By Zaheda Bhorat, Open Source Programs

Last night, July 24, at the Open Source Conference in Portland the winners of the coveted Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award were announced.

Following in the footsteps of past key contributors and open source visionaries, the five winners for 2007 are :

Karl Fogel - Best Community Builder
There's a common saying that open source isn't so much about the code itself, but about the communities that thrive around it. And Karl has become an oracle when it comes to the management of open source communities. As the founder and leader of the Subversion project, the harmony within the Subversion community has been attributed to Karl, because of his consistent leadership and maintenance of the culture-of-respect. This and his transfer of wisdom on community management into a book ("Producing Open Source Software", O'Reilly Media, also at producingoss.com) makes Karl our 2007 Best Community Builder.

Pamela Jones - Best FUD Fighter
When the SCO drama was being played out, one website became the place to get your knowledge. Pamela, or PJ, as she is known, leads research and reporting of legal events important to the FOSS community. Through her tremendous work, Groklaw continues to be the place to get our regular dose of legal insight and analysis.

Aaron Leventhal - Best Accessibility Architect
Aaron Leventhal is a long-time supporter of accessibility efforts. Earlier in his career he worked on a Braille publishing system used by teachers, publishers and individual Braille readers. He later joined Netscape as accessibility architect for Mozilla development, and has been involved with the Mozilla project almost since its beginnings. Aaron has single-handedly succeeded in turning Firefox from being an also-ran in web accessibility to being the preferred accessibility solution going forward.

David Recordon - Best Strategist
OpenID has gone from hack to Internet staple in an incredibly short period of time. Dave Recordon has turned OpenID into a viable alternative to non-open identity systems. He has taken on many organizations and made real headway towards pushing Identity into the open source space. This guy knows challenging, and he's met and conquered every challenge. For that reason David is this year's Best Strategist for his work on OpenID. All this, and he's not yet old enough to buy alcohol in the US.

Paul Vixie - Outstanding Lifetime Contributions
For decades Paul been one of the key players in the Domain Name System. He wrote and still maintains BIND, the nameserver most of the Internet uses. He's co-founded MAPS, a non-profit that fights spam. He's the operator of the F root server and he also holds the record for the most CERT security advisories. For his many contributions significant to the existence of the Internet, the "Outstanding Lifetime Contributions" winner is Paul Vixie.

Check here for OSCON pictures and blog posts from OSCON and the Open Source Awards event.

We would like to thank The Google and O'Reilly Open Source Awards Committee members and especially to each of you who participated in our first open nomination process for this award.

Until next year, please join us in congratulating each of our worthy winners for 2007.

BBC Interactive Flood Map

Posted by Jessica Lee, Product Manager, Google Maps

The BBC has created an interactive flood map with information about the floods happening in Berkshire, UK. The map includes flood alert information, emergency center locations, photos submitted by local residents, user-generated YouTube videos, and audio clips by BBC Radio correspondents. This is a great example of citizen journalism plus professional journalism, all mashed up on a map. If you have photos, videos or information about the flood that you'd like to submit for inclusion into the BBC's map, please send it to them at berkshire.online@bbc.co.uk.

Google Singleton Detector released

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We take testing very seriously at Google. You may have seen our testing blog and how we even test on the toilet.

We also like to create automated tools to make our lives easier and in the testing world this can mean having code to watch your back.

We have released a new tool that we have been playing with, the Google Singleton Detector, as open source. Its job is to find singletons and global state in the Java code that we produce. But wait, why would I care to find out where singletons may be in my code? In some cases they can make testing difficult and hide problems with your design. There's a bit more to it than that, so check out the FAQ for more info.

Do you maintain Java code and need to keep it nice and clean? Give the singleton detector a try!

Many thanks to David Rubel and the team for creating this, and working to get it out into the open source world.

Image Search with the AJAX Search API

By Ali Pasha, AJAX Search API Team

The Google AJAX Search API can be used to easily add Google Web, Local, Video, Blog, Book and News search to your website.

Today we've added yet another dimension to the API: support for Google Image Search. You can get started in no time, as the new functionality uses the same familiar search control model as the existing AJAX search controls. The search results can be displayed on your website, or mashed up to create a customized experience for your users.

Read more on the AJAX APIs blog, join the discussions in the developer forum or see an example to get started.

Imaging America

Posted by Stephen Chau, Product Manager

I'm pleased to announce that we have acquired ImageAmerica, a company that builds high resolution cameras for the collection of aerial imagery.

Google Maps and Earth users are no strangers to ImageAmerica's work -- the company provided high resolution black and white imagery of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

We're excited about how ImageAmerica's technology will contribute to our mapping services down the road. Since we're in the research and development phase right now it may be some time before you see any of this imagery in Google Maps or Earth -- we'll keep you posted on this blog!

Weekly Google Code Roundup for July 16-20th

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

This week we have the pleasure of having MashupCamp hosted walking distance from the Googleplex. It was great to meet people from varied backgrounds in an open spaces format, and to see so many Googlers there mixing in with the fun. We had discussions around the Google Mashup Editor, Google Geras, and of course our various APIs such as Maps and AJAX Search and Feeds.

In API and developer-product news...

Feed Discovery API and AJAX Search on the iPhone

The AJAX API team launched new functionality in the AJAX Feed API. You can now lookup and discover feeds based on a search or URL. They also posted an iPhone targeted version of the AJAX Search component.

Build Your Campus in 3D winners announced

The results are in for the winners of the Build Your Campus in 3D Competition. The judges chose 7 teams from among the dozens who submitted more than 4000 buildings from higher education institutions all over North America. Tag a fly through your school and see if it has changed!

Google SketchUp for Dummies

Staying with the world of Google Earth, Google SketchUp For Dummies was published, and a companion website is now live as well as videos.

Google Open Source Team at OSCON

For those who will be at OSCON and are interested in learning about Google's open source activities, come hear our annual open source update or learn more about how the community has used our project hosting service since its launch at OSCON 2006. For those interested in our developer applications, we'll be taking a look at how to write large, multipage Ajax applications with Google Web Toolkit and getting up close and personal with Google Gears. We're excited to hear your feedback and answer your questions.

Around Google

Hosted site searches for Australian businesses

Deepak Ramanathan announced Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), a hosted site search solution that provides Google-quality results for your website. It's fast, relevant, reliable, and flexible, so that users can quickly find what they're looking for through search results customized and integrated into your business website.

Message Center: Let us communicate with you about your site

Maile Ohye posted about a new Message Center which is a new way for webmasters to receive personalized information from Google in our webmaster console. Should we need to contact you, you'll see a notification in your Webmaster Tools dashboard.

Our commitment to open broadband platforms

Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives, has written a detailed post on the policy behind Google's commitment to open broadband platforms, including open applications, open devices, open services, and open networks.

Google Reader is More Podcast-Friendly

Ionut Alex Chitu posted on the unofficial Google Operating System blog about how Google Reader works as a podcast catcher, including how you can pop-out the music player.

Featured Projects

Prague 360 makes great usage of the Google Maps API to show beautiful gigapixel mapping of certain cities, including 360 degree visualizations.

FindBugs is an open source static analysis tool to find coding defects in Java programs. Surprise yourself and run this on your code base.

Google Tech Talks

Split Snapshots: A New Approach to Old State Storage

Kurzweil says, computers will enable people to live forever and doctors will be doing ... all backup of your memories by late 2030. This talk is not about that, yet. Instead, the remarkable drop in disk costs makes it possible and attractive to retain past application states and store them for a long time for mining or auditing.

Amigo: Proximity-based Authentication of Mobile Devices

Secure and spontaneous communication between wireless devices that come within close ... all proximity of each other, but lack a pre-existing trust relationship -- devices that are previously unknown to each other -- is an important component of many future pervasive applications.

Eyal de Lara came to talk about Amigo, a proximity-based authentication of mobile devices.

Podcasts

Google Developer Podcast Episode Five: Adam Sah on Google Gadgets

We got to chat with Adam Sah of the Google Gadgets team about all things Gadgets. This includes the technology side of things but also the business side: such as monetizing your gadgets and the new Google Gadget Ventures.

Heading to OSCON?

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Google's Open Source Team will be out in full force at OSCON 2007, and we welcome the chance to meet more members of the community at the conference. For those interested in learning about Google's open source activities, come and hear our annual open source update or learn more about how the community has used our project hosting service since its launch at OSCON 2006. For those interested in our developer applications, we'll be taking a look at how to write large, multipage Ajax applications with Google Web Toolkit and getting up close and personal with Google Gears. We're excited to hear your feedback and answer your questions.

Better still, several members of our team will be sharing some of the lessons they've gleaned from their years of contribution to open source. Come on by and learn about:

• Dispelling Legal Myths: Things OSS Developers Get Wrong About the Law


• Geek Herding on a Shoestring (BoF)


• How to Protect Your Open Source Project from Poisonous People


• Subversion Worst Practices


• What's In It For Me? How Your Company Can Benefit from Open Sourcing Code

On the other hand, life isn't all fun and talks. Come hack on Google Web Toolkit with us, join us for the Google Summer of Code community BoF, and find out the 2007 winners of the Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards.

We look forward to seeing you there!

NASA in Google Earth

Posted by Wei Luo, Senior GIS Specialist

A few months back, Google Earth team and NASA began a collaborative effort to bring awareness and promote knowledge of NASA's "earth" programs. After months of production, the "NASA" layer group is now live in Google earth.

Personally, I find it quite eye-catching. People are usually familiar with NASA's space missions, but not everyone knows that NASA also devotes a considerable amount of effort to Earth explorations. This new NASA layer group showcases some of their most interesting content.

The new "NASA" layer has three components:

• Astronaut Photography of Earth
• Satellite Imagery
• Earth City Lights

Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken photographs of the Earth. The "Astronaut Photography of Earth" layer showcases some of the best of photos from the online Astronaut Photography collection.



The "Satellite Imagery" layer highlights some of the most interesting Earth imagery taken by NASA satellites over the years. Some placemarks also offer the option of downloading additional imagery from different years or seasons and overlaying them on the earth's surface. Being a space program lover, I used to spend hours on the NASA website looking at these photos, so it's nice to have them at my fingertips. Be sure to check out the satellite image overlays of continuous eruption of Mt. Etna at 37.730000°, 15.000000° if you are a volcano lover like me.

"Earth City Lights" offers a new perspective on this popular image. One can identify some interesting urbanization patterns around the globe. I find it even more interesting to have roads and placename layers on at the same time as I fly over this layer. The United States interstate highway system appears as a lattice connecting the brighter dots of city centers. The Trans-Siberian railroad also shows up as a thin line stretching from Moscow through the center of Asia to Vladivostok. The Nile River can be viewed from a distance as another bright thread through an otherwise dark region. I really enjoy flying to different places around the globe, finding unexpected things and thinking about what the cause might be.

In other news, we've also updated the European roads in Google Earth, adding 15 new countries in Europe, as well as adding more content for the Netherlands, like business listings layers and country names in Dutch. Check out these new and updated layers if you are planning a trip to Europe.

Google Developer Podcast Episode Five: Adam Sah on Google Gadgets

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Using iTunes?

The Google Gadget Ventures announcement was very exciting for us and the community. We couldn't wait to get Adam Sah of the Google Gadgets team to discuss Gadgets, and the new announcement.

Interview with Adam Sah on Google Gadget Ventures

What will you learn from this interview?

• What Google Gadgets actually are and how they compare to widgets and blidgets and blodgets and ....
• How there is a family of Gadgets. They aren't just for iGoogle!
• How you can develop Gadgets in HTML, Flash, Java applets, and more. After all, this is just iframes people.
• The security model with Gadgets
• The subtlety behind phishing and Gadgets
• The long tail of Gadgets, and how to share and promote your Gadgets
• How you can post Gadgets on your blog or website
• How we are in the second generation of Gadgets (not just a minimal view on your web app)
• What an appropriate amount of resources to put on Gadgets
• How to monetize your Gadgets
• Information about the Google Gadget Ventures program
• How to get going with the scratchpad in seconds
• How Mapplets are Gadget too
• How this is about real business (IBM and Salesforce.com)
• How to deal with high volume Gadgets, and how we are here to help.
• The role and timing of standardization of the gadget platforms

Read more about Google Gadgets, and check out the forum.

Start listening now

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

News

The following are links that we mentioned in the podcast:

AppleScripting Google Desktop means that you can tell the Google Desktop application to do things for you via script. Boss around the system from your own applications and scripts.

The new Google Earth Outreach program has some tutorials such as showing you how to create KML from a spreadsheet.

The Google Mashup Gallery is a mashup itself, that allows you to add your mashup to the mix. Now, everyone will be able to find your Britney vs. Christina mashup!

Geotagged Picasa JSON/KML Output + Driving Directions = Instant Scenic Tours: If you were following the Google blogs yesterday, you would have heard that Picasa now gives you a sleek drag+drop interface for geotagging your photos, and that the Picasa Google data API now outputs the geotagged data using GeoRSS & GML elements. And if you were excited by all that news and immediately visited Picasa to try out the new feature, you might have noticed the big blue KML icon next to a "View in Google Earth" hyperlink. So Picasa now gives developers geotagged photo data both in KML output and the standard Google data API output formats, and that means we map developers have a lot of ways to start playing around with Picasa photos.

New drag-to-route driving directions in google maps - once you have a route, drag the blue line around to have it automatically re-route using your desired roads or intermediate destinations.

Weekly Google Code Roundup for July 8-12th

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

In API and developer-product news...

Othman Laraki talked about the Gears roadmap and development process and how the team is working on a Cross-Origin API and an Improved Workerpool.

Omar Khan has introduced a new blog for the Google Desktop APIs which was created to open a another line of dialog and provide useful information such as tips, announcements, developer jokes, links to articles and tutorials, and more.

The new AJAX Search feature on Blogger that uses linked Custom Search Engines is a fantastic feature that allows you to implement ideas such as "search my blog, and reach out to other sites that I link too". All automatically.

GGeoXML Methods, GDraggableObject Events, & Geodesic Polylines details how the Maps API team has given developers GGeoXML functions to make loading and viewing files easier. GGeoXML now comes with a callback function that's entered once the file has loaded, plus a number of utility functions.

Dick Wall has written his second article on a series on Guice, Squeezing More Guice from Your Tests with EasyMock, which delves into how dependency injection and mock objects can be used together in glee.

Around Google

The FeedBurner and Blogger teams have joined up very quickly to create a nice integration of the two products. From within your Blogger settings you can now specify that you have a FeedBurner feed that manages your blog, and Blogger will use that feed address.

Featured Projects

This YouTube Mapplet mashes-up YouTube videos and Geo using the newly released Mapplets feature that now lives in My Maps.

The Telekinesis iPhone Remote allows you to use your shiny new iPhone to control your Mac.

Google Tech Talks

What Every Engineer Needs to Know About Security and Where to Learn It

Neil Daswani's talk discusses recent trends in security, and what every engineer needs to know to prevent the most significant emerging threats such as cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks.

While We Wait for BabelFish: Languages on theInternet

This talk addresses some localization issues, but beyond that, questions the very way languages are dealt with on the internet.

Podcasts

Summer of Coders at Google: Ed Baskerville

Now in his second year of working on GridSweeper for Summer of Code, Ed Baskerville recently joined us to talk more about his project and his burgeoning career as a cellist.

It's easy being green

Posted by Christopher Barry, Senior Vice President, Digital Media and Business Strategy, Sundance Channel

Here at the Sundance Channel, we recently launched a weekly programming block dedicated to the environment, called THE GREEN.

As part of this online environment, Google Maps for Enterprise technology offered us a great platform for developing the Eco-mmunity Map, an exciting interactive tool that supports our television shows and creates a community of users around eco issues. The Eco-mmunity Map allows you to list and search for green individuals, businesses, special attractions, and action points anywhere in the world through a customized site. The Google Maps technology makes it simple to share information about environmental causes and events in your community. You can input and search for green information based on four key category "markers" -- Individuals, Businesses, Green Action Points, and Green Attractions and Events. By posting markers with detailed descriptions, contact information, related web links, comments, ratings, and photos, you can share local knowledge and suggestions with others from around the world. So come on over to www.sundancechannel.com/map and start adding your content today.

Ultimately, our hope is that visitors to the Eco-mmunity Map will have the opportunity to share their knowledge and connect with others in the virtual green movement. We're grateful to the Google Maps for Enterprise team that helped make this online world possible.

Plone Sprint at Google

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Google recently hosted the Plone Documentation and E-Commerce Sprint, and more than forty stalwart sprinters got some amazing things accomplished in just five days. The documentation team completely revamped the project documentation hosted at Plone.org, so any newbies out there should now find it much easier to get started using Plone. They docs team also created a great deal of new documentation focused on Plone 3.0, which should be leaving Beta soon.

The E-Commerce team spent their time making improvements to GetPaid, Plone's payment processing framework. Led by Kapil Thangavelu, core contributor to Plone and Zope, the team finished out the week with three payment processors, including Google Checkout, integrated into the framework. They also added shipping functionality to ease the order fulfillment process. Even cooler, the team started off their work with code targeted towards helping non-profits easily take donations through their Plone-based websites, and mission accomplished!

Congratulations to both teams for their many accomplishments during the sprint! Thanks to all of you for being our guests.

Armchair road warrior

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager, Google Earth

Ever imagined yourself diving in Chuuk, Micronesia? How about visiting the Mayan ruins of Yaxha, Guatemala? Well, maybe it's time you did. Though you probably won't make it to South America or the South Pacific in person before Labor Day, you can pay some quick visits to these and other exotic locales from the comfort of your computer, courtesy of Matt Harding, who has has been traveling to as many places in the world as possible, and dancing badly in all of them. Ten million YouTube views later, Matt has teamed up with the Google Earth crew to give us all a peek at some of his favorite stopping points. You can check out Matt's video below and, if you have Google Earth installed, explore lots of practical travel info (Yelp restaurant reviews for Las Vegas, for instance) by loading this Earth overlay file.

Google Maps Mashups 2.0

Posted by Thai Tran, Product Manager

When we were building the original Google Maps site, we envisioned that it would eventually become a platform for navigating all kinds of location-based information, such as home listings and travel information. Within weeks of the launch of Google Maps, we were pleasantly surprised that an independent developer named Paul Rademacher released HousingMaps.com, a site that displayed housing listings from Craigslist on top of our interactive maps -- what is now known as a "mashup" -- without needing help from anyone at Google. Hoping to encourage even more of this type of innovation, we released the official Google Maps API in June 2005, and since then, developers have created over 50,000 Google Maps mashups.

However, we noticed many of these mashups simply displayed a static set of places on a map, such as the best bars in San Francisco, yet the authors had to set up a website and write Javascript code to generate the map, which is not something that we could expect the average person to do. We also noticed that much of this great content was not getting discovered, even though millions of users were coming to Google Maps every day and searching for [bars] and [homes for sale].

To address these issues, we started two major projects:

In April, we released the first version of "My Maps," which empowers anyone to create a personal map simply by dropping placemarks onto the map. These maps are hosted on Google Maps and can be shared with friends and family. When marked as "public," these maps are automatically included into the Google Maps search index so that other users can find them. Since the launch of the "My Maps" tab, over 4 million maps have been created.

While this drag-and-drop editor is a great tool, we still needed a solution to help with mashups that have dynamic content such as real-time weather conditions. Thus, we created the Google Mapplets platform, which enables any developer to create mini applications that overlay their content and services onto Google Maps. We announced a preview version of Mapplets in May, and over 100 developers submitted Mapplets within the first month.

Today, we've brought these two features together under the "My Maps" tab on Google Maps. You can now layer information from multiple sources on the same map as well as save content that's relevant to you into a personal map. For example, if you're looking for a home in Chicago, you can add Mapplets that display real estate listings and Chicago Transit Authority train lines so that you can find out which homes are near public transit. To get an even richer sense of the surroundings, you could also layer in photos of the neighborhood and local events (from Zvents). When you find a home that you're interested in, simply click on "Save to My Maps" in the home's info bubble and save a copy of it to your personal map.

To get started, check out this demo video and then head over to the "My Maps" tab to find great maps and tools you can add from the Google Maps Directory.

Build Your Campus in 3D Competition - the results are in!

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Education Program Development

Congratulations to the winners of Google’s Build Your Campus in 3D Competition!

An estimated 4,000 campus buildings were modeled and submitted from all over North America. In August, the winning students and advisors (41 people from 7 teams) will be flying to our headquarters in Mountain View for a 3-day visit and workshop.

Our panel of industry experts, which included Bobby Brooks of Walt Disney Imagineering, Ken Harsha of Electronic Arts, Janet Martin of Communication Arts Inc., Paul Seletsky of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Gary Smith of Green Mountain Geographics, LTD selected the following winners:

University of Minnesota - Department of Architecture
Purdue University - Departments of Computer Graphics Technology and Education
Concordia University, Loyola Campus - Department of Civil Engineering
Stanford University - Department of Architectural Design
Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) - Departments of Engineering and Computer Science
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering - Department of Engineering
Dartmouth College - Departments of Computer Science and Digital Art

Some thoughts from the judges…"Last week, we had the opportunity to watch college campus environments come alive with SketchUp and Google Earth. We couldn't help but be impressed with the effort put forth by the many teams and individuals who participated. The selection of finalists was the result of a lively discussion and a careful model review…You've set a very high standard and hopefully inspired those that will follow you."


Visit the official competition website to see the winning campus models.

Weekly Google Code Roundup for July 2-6th

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Having the July 4th holiday smack in the middle of the week creates a strange week when it is hard to know which day it is. That being said, we have seen some interesting uses of our APIs, and we are happy to welcome a new team to Google.

In API and developer-product news...

Aleksander Fedorynski felt like "a penguin assigned to work on Herring Search" when he started building improvements to Google Code Search.

Alex Komoroske asked if you want spreadsheet filtering? and answers with a feature-rich auto filter that makes great use of the Spreadsheet Data API. Do a view source and see how it all works!

Mark Berghausen of the Search Quality Team has written a few words about the search considerations designers should think about when building a Flash-heavy site in: Best uses of Flash.

July 4th has gone, but the mashup is still here. Paul McDonald made it easy to find fireworks in your area, using the Google Mashup Editor. Speaking of which, Don Schwartz talks about how you can edit our mashup in whatever editor you choose.

Around Google

If you call 1-800-GOOG-411 you can now say "map it" and a map will be sent to you.

GrandCentral is now part of the team: "GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users."

Featured Projects

The Rocket GWT library provides the ability to define beans, properties, references and other Spring like concepts in GWT.

The Digg Roundup Gadget is a gadget based on the Digg Roundup tool, accompanied by a detailed "how-to" write up.

Google Tech Talks

The Seattle Conference on Scalability recently took place and a lot of great talks from the event have been made available:

• Scaling Google for Every User by Marissa Mayer
• Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets by Jeff Dean
• MapReduce Used on Large Data Sets by Barry Brumitt
• Building a Scalable Resource Management by Khalid Ahmed
• SCTPs Reliability and Fault Tolerance by Brad Penoff, Mike Tsai, and Alan Wagner
• Lessons In Building Scalable Systems by Reza Behforooz
• YouTube Scalability by Cuong Do Cuong

Real time traffic, now on your iGoogle page

Mark Tsui, Software Engineer

As most of you probably know, we offer real-time traffic information on Google Maps and Google Maps for mobile -- great for when you're looking directions and want to see what's really going on out there, or for when you're in your car already and want to avoid the traffic jam up ahead. We've found, however, that one of the best ways to use this information is to do a quick check before your regular commute, and we wanted to make doing that as easy as possible. To help with this, this week we enabled real-time traffic on the iGoogle maps gadget, so you can take a quick peek at what's happening on the roads any time you look at your iGoogle page. If you don't already have the maps gadget for iGoogle, you can install it here. In addition to real-time traffic information, it gives you quick access to a map and local search results, so it's useful to have around for quick access to a map any time.

Improvements to Google Code Search

By Aleksander Fedorynski, Software Engineer

When I first came to Google, I was curious (and anxious) to learn what project I'd be working on. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I'd be helping build Google Code Search. I felt like a penguin assigned to work on Herring Search -- even more so because the project involved searching with regular expressions, a non-trivial problem to get right. We launched Code Search last October, enabling search over billions of lines of public source code. Today we made some updates to Code Search that will hopefully make it even easier to find the code you're looking for.

First, we've expanded our crawl to include not just complete archives and repositories, but individual code files and sample code snippets from webpages as well. Now when you search for things like [LFractalCanvas] or [nph-refresh], you'll have a better chance of finding what you want. Second, we've made a few ranking adjustments, such as putting class and function definitions closer to the top for a lot of searches. Lastly, Code Search is now available in domains outside the United States, from my home country of Poland, to Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, and Spain, to name a few.

We hope you'll continue giving us feedback on ways to improve Code Search. There's a lot of code out on the web, and we've still got a lot of work left to make it all accessible and useful for developers everywhere.