New Google Earth Imagery – April 19

Just in time for Where 2.0, Google has pushed out some fresh imagery! Thanks to GEB reader ‘Munden’ for pointing it out. I’m not able to dig into it too much right now while I’m at the conference, so the extent of it is unknown. Dig in and see what you can find.

japan.jpg

As is usually the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or not a specific area is fresh. This new imagery isn’t in Google Maps yet, so you can compare Earth vs. Maps to see what’s new; the fresh imagery is already in Google Earth, but the old imagery is still in Google Maps. If you compare the two side-by-side and they’re not identical, that means that you’ve found a freshly updated area in Google Earth!

[UPDATED – 19-April, 9:54pm EST]

  • Germany: Various areas — thanks ‘sladys’
  • Japan: Ishinomaki — thanks ‘Munden’
  • United States: Arizona (Phoenix, Tucson), Kansas (Wichita), Massachusetts (Cape Cod), New Mexico (Albuquerque) and Texas (Amarillo, Austin) — thanks ‘ChrisK’, ‘ChrisZ’, ‘GT’ and ‘Jonahrf’

If you find any other updated areas, please leave a comment and let us know!

Are we there yet?

Is anybody home?
It’s been three weeks since we announced that the Esri Geoportal extension would be released as open source. It may have seemed a bit quiet since, but rest assured, a lot has happened.

In my previous post I indicated we were looking at a Creative Commons-esk license model. Several people pointed out that this license is not recommended for source code. And yes we did see the FAQ on that topic.

And so started a quest for an appropriate license model that would give everyone: developers, implementers, and (sorry folks!) Esri what they need. If there only was a geek channel on TV. this would have made a great ‘America’s next top (license) model’ show.

Along the way we revisited a great resource collected by the state of Massachusetts IT Division. It’s a bit dated, but the basics still apply.

While Esri has experience with open source from a licensing-in perspective,