Last week, at a meeting at IFTF, I was able to talk to several people about Google Earth. The common reaction from those that had tried it was ... great idea ... beautiful implementation ... but what practical application can it have? It could be used for a dynamic presentation, but how can you use it for some business leverage? Its an interesting question, I have now used it a number of times, and it appears that most of the location-based applications could be done by Google Maps. Once you are done looking at all the places you have traveled, what is the additional value?
My opinion changed when I looked at the 3D layers available, an example of the San Francisco shoreline is shown above. This feature is available for some US cities. The tilted flat terrain is still there, but now 3D abstractions have been added to the land. They are abstractions because they don't show the actual form of the buildings, just rectilinear pieces. No details are on the building walls since these would not be seen from an overhead satellite, and need to be gathered in another way, say from a helicopter or plane (I understand MS's competitive package is seeking to add this).
This led me to think further about how such a visualization could help to add abstract data to the terrain pictures. A sort of augmented reality, where the reality here is the terrain images, and the buildings are representations of data that has geographical implications. Imagine painting a building to provide information about that location's status. Not a new thing for GIS applications, we have experimented with it in regional sales applications, and even in such micro-geographies such as the supermarket aisle. Google's 'advanced' forms of Earth appear to include some additional capabilities that allow layers to be edited.
The Layers, linked to the terrain images are work thinking about in more depth. Other ideas out there? I be glad to collaborate in an experiment with real data. As a final review, Google needs to update their images ... yes I know its free ... but its jarring to see some areas covered in clouds (Cape Town SA, for example) ... or of very minimal accuracy.
In the August Wired, p. 32, an article: Podcasting for the Man, which mentions the Axe Body Spray Podcast, An example of a large corporation attempting to use podcasting for marketing:
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