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One of the things I do with Google Earth is install a GPS tracker on my cell phone and take it on a skydive. I use MyTracks to log my coordinates every second and use a little application I wrote to turn the MyTracks data into a KML file, detect where I deployed my canopy and drop a push-pin there and plot the jump on Google Earth so you can see the jump in 3D. MyTracks actually has an "Export to KML" option, but it doesn't handle altitude very well and just clamps your entire track to the ground. Apparently the developers didn't consider the "I'm 2.5 miles above the surface of the planet" use-case when they wrote the thing heh.

The cell phone isn't a great GPS tracker to use for this -- the GPS hardware in the Samsung Galaxy S5 I'm using now is actually almost usable. The S3 used to regularly lose 2/3rds of the points on my jump. There are custom skydiver GPS units available that have much higher accuracy, and they're used regularly in wingsuit competitions and stuff like that. It'd be really neat to plot an entire load of skydivers together on Google Earth and do a real-time replay of each one's position along their track during the jump. I could pull this off using the socket server method of putting KML into Google Earth and updating a new point for each wingsuit's location every second. It wouldn't even really be all that much work, but I don't really like how I'd have to do the design, and that's kept me from it.

Of course Relativity is flawed. The point is that it's far less flawed than Newtonian mechanics.

Exactly.

Over 2,500 years ago, people believed the Earth was flat. Then people believed it was spherical. Then, around 400 years ago, people believed it was an oblate spheroid. Now we believe it's a lumpy potatoid (even taking local topography into account).

Those who believed the Earth was spherical were wrong (only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo still believe this), but still, they were less wrong than those who believed it was flat.

Relativity is wrong. But it's less wrong than Newtonian mechanics.

A+ for being uninformed/dumb and non-observant. There's an Openlayers map on the page to see where people are posting their thanks from.

About...

OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. OpenLayers has been developed to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the 2-clause BSD License (also known as the FreeBSD).

http://openlayers.org/
http://osm.org/

Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.

Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.

And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers, which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap, includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.

The really funny part about your "advocating" is that MS has an Ajax library that does exactly the same thing as its Silverlight counterpart: http://www.seadragon.com/developer/ajax/

For those projects that don't care about IE support, HTML5 canvas/video/audio is a fantastic leap forward for the web. For the rest, business as usual for some time to come I'm afraid.

No, it's not. You have the option to double your coding efforts, and implement your canvas features in VML as well (see for example OpenLayers for nicely abstracted code; it has 3 renderers: canvas, SVG and VML), or use ExCanvas, which does all that for you. It's slower compared to a native implementation, but it works.

Related, there is more 'social data and social software' at the White House today. The WH Change website now uses OpenLayers and OpenStreetMap! Great to see such penetration of open data and open source :-)

..posted too early:

OpenLayers or Mapstraction for an abstraction layer that (in theory) enables you to switch providers easily.

OpenLayers

I keep hoping that Google will start releaseing some of their data into the public domain/GPL/Creative Commons.
That Google spy van must be gathering data like speed limits, which streets are one way. Maybe even which are paved and not.

You're right for StreetView (you can still use Google's StreetView data in OpenLayers.org for example), otherwise, Google Maps/Earth licenses data from others (Tele Atlas/NAVTEQ/DigitalGlobe/GeoEye/etc), so they are not the ultimate geodata owner (yet? ;-).

One place missing GPL application is a really good navigation system.

Yes but... do you really need this? When you'll buy your GPS-enabled navigation system (e.g. from Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, etc), you'll be given appropriate software that works with the hardware you just purchased (even the iPhone has (in dev) it's turn by turn nav syst software). You don't "need" to install an open source nav syst.

That said, I agree, a solid open source nav syst would be nice. Roadnav is an example, but I think it's not as mature as commercial offers. The data for such an open source software project already exists on OpenStreetMap.org.

You can also have a look at http://www.openlayers.org/, another very good javascript API for mapping.

For your information, OpenStreetMap uses the OpenLayers.org API to render its maps. The two have very different purposes.

Really. Don't want to get stucked by one of the numerous webmap providers? Use OpenLayers.org. OpenLayers, open source, will legally allow you to connect to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other providers' data and switch between any without ever changin your code. No jokes, this is the best choice. Of course, it allows you to do *much* more. Want to learn more? Also, OpenLayers works perfectly with other widely used webmapping software, such as GeoServer.org and many others. See also the webmapping section over Slashgeo.org. (Yes I'm one of the founders, but it's really on-topic! :-) Why not read this entry on the webmapping APIs and data access.

OpenLayers, an open source (BSD License) javascript library for generating your own maps., also supports the GeoRSS standard.

If you ever wanted to use your own set of tiles for a map... this is the software for you. FYI IANADeveloper on it but if you're good with RICO or Prototype you should be. We all need an alternative mapping system that is mature and ready for general use out there for applications that may differ from the norm (like a map of something other than the earth... a building for instance).

A previous poster already mentioned that Google's Picasa is a free and easy tool to add geolocation to the EXIF metadata of photos and then publish them on Google Earth or Google Maps. Of course, there are plenty of other tools to do just that. Examples include this one for the mac, or this other one specifically for iPhoto. You'll get much more photo geocoding tools examples here.

Oh, and by the way, instead of using the Google Maps API to show them on your website, I invite you to try OpenLayers, which does the same thing, except that it's open, supported by the OSGeo and allows you to toggle from Google data to Microsoft or Yahoo or any WMS server easily.

Replying to my own question, but I think I found the most complete OS project out there for geolocation log statistics....

I've been playing with phpMyVisites and it looks a very nice and thorough implementation of what I was looking for.

Although it's method for country geolocation is a bit *cough* rough, I think a module to hook into Space Cowboy's hostip.info shouldn't be too difficult...

The only problem with it is it uses mysql to store the logs *grrrrr*

OpenLayers looks slick!

I don't know the answer, but I can direct you to OpenLayers.org and to the Open Source Geospatial foundation to look for answers. I'm interested to the answer because we want to geolocate visitors for slashcode itself, and I copied your question on Slashgeo.org, which may help attract more answers to this /. story.

While your at it, GeoRSS is also open and, in my opinion, the future of RSS. Learn more about it here.

Those interesting in the topics should take a look at the Google Maps Hack book (review here).

Anyone whom have interest in Google Maps API must take a look at the numerous alternatives. Which includes OpenLayers.org (which just released v2.0). There are various other alternatives, all with different levels of interoperability and compatibility with OGC standards. On the subject, see slashgeo's web mapping section.
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