Here’s another super helpful trick to make it easy to keep up on news events being reported via KML. Ideally, timely information with a Geographic component would be published via GeoRSS feeds which would make it easy to consume in standard RSS readers. But often KML files are used instead as is the case of this ongoing account of the war between Georgia and Russia. The downside is that there is no easy way to be alerted when the author makes an edit or addition.

Live Maps has an easy fix for this. You can pluck an RSS feed for any KML file you are viewing at our site. Star by viewing the KML. Use the Mapurl parameter to specify the KML file you want to view like this:

http://maps.live.com/?mapurl=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=1217876

Once it loads, hit the subscribe  link to get your RSS feed

Add the resulting feed to your newsreader and you’re all set; Changes to the Source KML file will show up in your RSS reader. As a bonus, the resulting feed is actually a GeoRSS feed as opposed to a vanilla RSS feed so you can use it in any application that can consume GeoRSS as well

As Search Engine Land mentioned today, Live Maps has pretty decent maps in Georgia that have been useful to a lot of people looking to follow the news there (we get a lot of base map data from AND in the region). In some cities, like the capital city of Tbilisi, we have good high res aerial imagery as well. But basemaps and imagery should just be the first step of exploration in Live Maps; turning on the ‘Explore’ feature exposes tons of user contributed content from across the web and is a great way to learn about a region. We crawl and index sites like Platial, Virtual Globetrotting, wikipedia, Live Maps Collections and hundreds more to create a fantastic explore experience.

After doing a search for a City, you can hit the ‘Explore Collections’ link in the result panel or you can go to the Collections –> Explore Collections menu at any time. Once turned on, use the filtering tools in the result panel to change sort order, show only photos, filter by tag etc… As you drag and zoom the map, your results will refresh.

note - You may see a lot of duplicate listings as you explore – this is generally from crawling a KML file that appears at multiple websites; in our next release we have a couple of optimizations coming to eliminate the dupes.

Here are a few Explore links to get you started – Wikipedia articles in the North, Exploring Tbilisi, Photos.

Awesome to have Avi joining our team here at Microsoft. he’s got a pretty detailed post on his RealityPrime blog talking about his latest career change. here’s an excerpt -

In this current job search, one of the big companies actually surprised and impressed me, not only in their offer, but throughout the process, the people and professionalism. The two days of on-site interviews weren’t as much about testing my coding skills as they were about vision, work styles, and that ever-elusive "fit."

Turns out, I actually had fun. And in the end, my bosses-to-be offered exactly the kind of role I wanted with the freedom to define it myself — new, challenging, and some potentially very big wins on the horizon, straddling both R&D and productization with the goal of adding value wherever I can

Avi has contributed in big ways to some pretty well known software projects like Keyhole and Second Life. I’m looking forward to seeing what he sinks his teeth into next.

This past January we introduced a feature on Live Maps that enabled you to send a Collection to your compatible Navigation system over FM airwaves; Using the MSN Direct spot network any PC could ‘broadcast’ a series of navigation waypoints to compatible devices. This capability just became available to any website thanks to an API and also works with USB connected Nav devices. This Press release has most of the details. Garmin is a key partner for this service:

“As more and more consumers are using their PC to locate their desired destinations and then needing to find those exact locations on their GPS device, MSN Direct is making that process easier for our customers,” said Roger Jollis, Garmin’s director of OEM and mobile marketing. “Garmin was the first to offer MSN Direct on an automotive GPS, and we are pleased with MSN Direct’s newest innovation because it will be very helpful to our customers.”

We have of course updated the feature at Live Maps to take advantage of these new capabilities. Using it is simple – Create a Collection at Live Maps, then use the ‘Actions –> Send to GPS’ menu to initiate the send. Like this:

Animators, artists, graphic designers.

there’s lots of talk today around the release of trueSpace 7.6, especially now that its price has dropped from 700 dollars to zero. Most of the talk is from mapping and GIS focused blogs, which i guess is understandable since it was the mapping division of Microsoft that became the home for Caligari after they were acquired last year. and therefore its also understandable that many of the articles try to compare trueSpace with Google Sketchup. yes, both can export 3D models into virtual worlds (google earth and virtual earth respectively), but that is just the tip of the iceberg. its sorta like trying to compare Visual Studio to UltraEdit; Ultraedit is great for small solo projects but you wouldn’t use it to debug a remote web application.

trueSpace is an integrated application for modeling, animating and rendering with features like inverse kinematics for easy character animation, physics simulation, timeline based storyboarding, and ray traced rendering with motion blur and depth of field effects putting it in the phenomenal Lightwave’s league in the under 1000 dollar weight class. advanced features like collaborative editing in a 3d virtual world may even make users of more expensive products  like Maya or Softimage. its usefulness goes well beyond simply adding 3d models to Virtual Earth.

Roman Ormandy created trueSpace V1 over 20 years ago and offers these insights on the latest release on his blog:

trueSpace7.6's modeling tools feature a variety of surface representations including full polygonal editing, subdivision surface modeling, NURBS, metaballs, and implicit surfaces. Those are supported by400+ modeling tools like real-time Boolean operations with full construction history so you can move subtracted parts of your design at any time during your work, or even change a subtraction to an intersection.

trueSpace 7.6 also provides advanced surfacing tools like layered materials, texture maps, normal maps, procedural materials, UVE projections, real-time DX9 pixel shaders that include shaders to simulate subsurface scattering, reflection, refraction, smoke, fire, water, anisotropicshader, metallic paint, glass – and those are just the real-time shaders!

The animation capabilities are even more impressive.trueSpace7.6 supports key-frame and motion capture animation on fully hierarchical objects. Key-frame animations can be seamlessly blended with procedural animations and physical simulations, all of which can fully interact with each other. This means you can have a walking character animated by key-frames getting hit by a procedurally animated car and fly away in response to the collision thanks to physical simulation.

…Finally, trueSpace7.6 is the only 3D authoring tool on the market which will allow you do all of the above in real-time shared 3D collaborative spaces where members of the design or animation team can maintain real-time interaction from anywhere in the world.

Download your copy now and definitely check out this great overview of the VE relevant features on Chris’s blog

I came across this first app from the earthware blog this week - London Executive Property Bird at first glance is just another Virtual Earth Real Estate app (JaveRea) but it is very well designed and contains some great UX touches like pin clustering. You can read the story of the company behind it in SQM Magazine this month on page 56. yes, its that kind of magazine with pages and all.

With Birds Eye Tourist in hibernation for nearly a year Virtual Globetrotting has been the place to go for online sky spotting. And the gang at VG do an amazing job running that site; its very well organized and has easy to consume feeds for just about everything. and now there's a new kid in town picking up where BET left off with the longer format posts - Meet Virtual Birds Eye. VBE is a little more of a traditional blog featuring tutorials and detailed posts like this one on how to use Mapcruncher and Virtual Earth to view seating a the Indianapolis motor speedway. I hope they continue to focus on this type of content.

Next up is this flash based map for travel planning at Planet Eye. Its not just Flash for the sake of flash, but they use the tools at hand for some very useful effects.

And finally, I've been really enjoying this Silverlight based KML editor from IDV Solutions. read some background on the app on their blog here.

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example. Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along [source]

huh? In fairness, I’ve seen more egregious butcherings of GPS related tech from bloggers in the mapping/gis domain, but still a 2 minute perusal of the wikipedia article on GPS by Apple could help to avoid further clouding of this already very misunderstood technology. If you can get 2 successive fixes, you can calculate direction and speed. assuming you have access to the underlying street network, you can then calculate turn guidance. software and data!

There’s a mapping party in Seattle July 26th to help build out Open Street Maps’s (OSM) coverage here.  If you’re in the Seattle area that day stop by to contribute to this fantastic resource. If you have a GPS device bring it along but its not necessary as there will be loaners available. Save the date on your calendar then check back here to get the meet up spot to kick things off. Hopefully the weather is just as fantastic as it has been this week.

Not Familiar with OSM? The Open Street Map  project is a very ambitious attempt to create a user contributed vector map of the entire world. I’ve been following the project for the last couple of years and they have made amazing progress! There are a number of ways to contribute to the project (online editing, solo uploads, etc…) but one of the most fun is a mapping party; a bunch of folks coordinate to drive a city with GPS’s and upload their collective data to the system.

The map data maintained by OSM is freely accessible to anyone. You can download the data and build your own renderer if you wish. Or you can use tiles pre-rendered by OSM. Here are some links to get to know OSM -

• Try it. Map of Microsoft in Redmond. Or London.
• Read about Open Street Map at Wikipedia
• OSM FAQ
• Info on previous mapping party in Bristol

This post by Greg Sterling this AM is a good reminder to tell you about one of my favorite features on Live Maps – Distance and Area calculations. If you ever wanted to know how far it is between 2 cities or what the area of the surface of a given lake is, Live Maps drawing tools make it really easy.

Even without drawing you can calculate directions to get the approximate drive time and distance between any 2 points by right clicking and choosing ‘Drive From…’ and ‘Drive to…’. Live maps has intercity vector map data for just about everywhere on Earth, including places it doesn’t have detailed city streets for.

But you can tailor the trail by using the Collections –> Open Your Collections  menu to draw your own lines or shapes. Whether it is a simple 2 point line or a complex closed polygon, Live Maps will show you the distance and area/perimeter respectively. Here is Greg’s ‘Crow Flies’ distance from Haifa to Sfat. 

And here is a Polygon drawn around the nearby Sea of Galilee showing that it is 63.33 Square Miles. If you sign in with your Live ID you can save your drawings in the cloud making them easy to share with others without the need for really long URL’s.

MVP developer Chris Pietschmann posted some nice javascript code for determining if a coordinate is in a polygon.  Chris started with code from this MSDN tutorial and focused on simplifying the polygon case. Both articles together should give you everything you need to know for drawing shapes and testing for containment in your client code. for the full spec on drawing with Virtual Earth, steal some code from the interactive SDK.

A big update to http://ditu.live.com/ went out yesterday featuring real time traffic information in Beijing and a free Send to Mobile feature for local search results and transit information. Transit info is now available in 31 cities and many new subway lines have been added for existing areas. Other improvements since V1 include lots more geocoding coverage and refreshed map tiles representing the latest vector street data. click the image below to try it out -

This morning’s news [SearchEngineLand | Chris P Blog] that Ask.com’s maps and directions site has migrated from an application built on deCarta’s (formerly Telcontar) mapping platform to Virtual Earth got me wondering about the future of self hosting of mapping infrastructure for high volume sites. The question isn’t if there is a future here at all, there is. In fact the Virtual Earth appliance is offered to our customers with really specialized needs (off the grid or lots of custom pre-rendered data are a couple of good cases)  My question is how big this already niche market will become.

If your web based map app calls for supreme control and customization of cartography you historically would build your own cluster around ESRI’s universe of software and get to coding. For small to mid sized apps this was OK assuming you could make the development investment, but it broke down when scaling forced you to build out that cluster. this is where hosted solutions like Virtual Earth come in – you trade off a level of control (you don’t like our highway shields? sorry) for infinite scalability and performance.  Both are viable models for building your app and you could go with whichever worked for you. But Telcontar was offering a third option that always seemed to me to be the worst of both worlds – the limited control of hosted with all of the hosting and maintenance costs of building your own. Not everyone agrees with me of course and that’s the beauty of our free market, but i still don’t understand why someone would go this route for core maps/routes/geocoding. I’m biased as i want to see everyone building with VE of course, but if you have some insight into the deCarta model clue me in with a comment.

This brief mail came to me this AM from Vincent Tao who leads many of Microsoft's mapping and GIS initiatives in China -

CCTV (China Central Television) is the largest Chinese Broadcasting Company who owns the exclusive Olympics broadcasting rights for China. We just released the first version of VE integrated with CCTV Olympics site for ‘Euro Soccer Game 2008’. For the next phase, VE will be integrated with CCTV for the Olympics events.

Loopt co-founder Sam Altman was onstage yesterday at Apple's DevCon to launch the Loopt client app for iPhone. You can see it in action in this 2 minute video from ZDNet:

Loopt helps you keep tabs on your friends whereabouts from your mobile. One big difference between Loopt and most similar apps is that you don't need to continuously update your location manually; on location aware devices this is automated eliminating the 'stale location' problem many other apps suffered from. Loopt currently works on about 65 handsets with more on the way.

A couple of weeks ago I was commenting to our imagery team that the area around Mt Rushmore would be a great addition to our Birds Eye library; its one of the most recognizable landmarks in the US, but because of its remote location i guessed that only a small percent of folks had visited in person to see it and explore the area. now just a couple of weeks later I see it pop up in Birds Eye. I didn't realize i had that kind of influence with the imagery team :-)

The West view is pretty amazing. South is OK too, for seeing some of the behind the scenes goop on the mountain.

Whether my subjective opinion of their projects is positive or negative, I'm always intrigued by the work of Stamen Designs. Like a piece of art, i don't always know how to feel about it on first encounter but am compelled to dig further into it and develop an opinion. Within their somewhat experimental UI's usually lies a nugget of genius worth panning for. Their latest effort for Trulia, the Snapshot Geo-Photo viewer, has that in spades. I initially felt powerless against the undulating wiggly-armed photo monsters, but after playing with the slider and options at the bottom it started to feel pretty comfortable even reminding me of a few elements of the Photosynth UI. Techcrunch describes it as being Jello-like. shop around for homes in your area to give it a try.

My thanks to Tom Carden of Stamen for sending this my way. Some comments from Tom-

It's an alternative view of the homes currently listed for sale on trulia.com, and first and foremost it's about browsing photos on a map in a playful way. You can search for any city in the USA and either click around the map, scroll the slider or just hit the big play button and sit back and watch!

Once again we're using Virtual Earth imagery in Flash and we're really pleased with effect we came up with. We think the black inverted maps really make the photos pop out.

Matthew Quinlan from our office in the UK brings news of Mashed 08 this June 21st-

We’re delighted to announce that we’re partners for Mashed 08, and the next 100 tickets are available exclusively through Multimap and Microsoft. The event promises to be a great blend of hacking and mixing, with maybe even some sleeping thrown in. If you didn’t attend Hack Day last year, you missed out. I’d encourage you to make your way to Alexandra Palace on Saturday 21st June and get mashed.

So, the important bit. We have 100 tickets now available here. You’ll need the code, which is “microsoft”.

If you miss out, keep watching because more tickets will be released over the coming weeks. Hope to see you there.

The second major release of Live Maps for China is out and can be accessed at http://ditu.live.com. Congrats to our engineering team in China for getting this big update out - it represents many months of coding and brings some great improvements to map surfers in China. It also brings an API for developers and a localized SDK.  Qingsong is a Program Manager on the maps team in Beijing and has this rundown on the release.

I am pleased to announce that VE China 'Goliath'' release is live on http://ditu.live.com. Here is a list of the new and improved areas-

• VE China API for developers, with VE China SDK documentation on Chinese MSDN.
• Pinyin support for map search query
• Business photos on the details page
• Transit -  Improved route quality; better estimation of trip time; refreshed transit data for all 11 cities.
• Geocoding - Support Pinyin correction; geocoding match rate greatly improved
• New process for monthly data update leading to more timely and accurate maps and Business listings

...and boy are my arms tired. but at least I was able to capture some fabulous DIY aerial imagery along the way.

If that isn't funny to you, you probably weren't in Burlingame for the Where Conference this week. Chris Anderson showed off his unmanned drone built from toys and readily available off-the-shelf components. Completed with a camera phone that accepted remote commands via SMS and captured aerial photos, he had a DIY aerials capture system for well under a thousand bucks. On the same theme, on Tuesday Pict'Earth showed what they are doing to enable all of us to create our own layers of aerial imagery. Both were very thought provoking and inspirational presentations and definitely among the highlights of the event.

Leading the list of low-lights had to be Jeremy Bartley getting a vaudevillian hook after 5 minutes that would have embarrassed even Henny Youngman. I though the allotment of 5 minutes in the schedule was a typo, but sadly it wasn't. Has reality TV eroded our collective attention span to the point where 5 minutes of thinking is all we can handle? 

Other impressive presenters included Skyhook's Ryan Sarver on standardizing a Geolocation API for browser based apps and Adrian Holovaty from Everyblock. Oh! and going back to Monday, Steve Coast's deep dive on Open Street Map was my favorite session of the 3 days. Lots of great insight into the current state of the OSM project in a well paced entertaining presentation. If you aren't familiar with OSM, take a few minutes to poke around on the website and learn a little about what i see as one of the most ambitious mapping efforts ever - to create a freely available street level map of the entire world.

Two Henny Youngman references in one post. not bad. Actually, I'm not 100% sure that the "I just flew in..." joke originated with him. Anyone have a definitive citation of the source?

It's been a rough month here on Earth as far as natural disasters go between the Cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China this week. One of the folks working on our local search team is from the Sichuan province, an area very near the center of the quake that was hit very hard. Happily for Hong she was able to reach her family as communications came back online and they were all ok, but for thousands more the news is not so good. if you want to help with a donation to the relief effort, Hong suggested the China Tomorrow Education Foundation, an organization focused on bringing education to children in rural areas, who have set up an earthquake relief fund this week.

For those in China, the Ditu.Live team is maintaining this map  of events. I also found this map animation and this BBC map helpful in understanding the geography.