The folks at USC’s Interactive Media Division have got a cool project underway. Viewfinder. Their stated objective is "to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind" and specify that "a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute". If that still sounds like a bit like technical gobbley-goop, here is the idea: You take a picture of someone in front of a landmark. Now you want to superimpose that photo into a 3D world so that the image is perfectly aligned to the model.

Did that help? No??? OK, then watch their video (below) and you will get the idea immediately.

Tags: google, google earth, panoramic, usc, photooverlay, google maps, mashup, viewfinder

Another outstanding source of information. This time for the San Diego fires. This map comes courtesy of KPBS in San Diego. Click on the link below the map for a larger view of the map.


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Tags: fire, google, mashup, visualization, california, san diego county

One of the fires currently out of control in Southern California is about 5 miles directly north from our home. Called the Santiago Fire, it was started by an arsonist. The Orange County Register is maintaining an outstanding Google Map of the fire's progress. What's more, each of the points denoted on the map provides a wealth of information.


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Many thanks to the OC Register for maintaining this great source of information.

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Tags: fire, orange county, google, mashup, california

As a Southern California native, I have seen my share of fires, but this year is different. Every year it is the same week -- the week before Halloween. As of this writing, there are 16 major fires burning in Southern California, all fueled by some of the driest weather I can remember, coupled by 90+ degree temperatures and of course, very strong Santa Ana winds (in excess of 80 mph gusts in some areas).
The closest fire to us, the Santiago fire, is about 10 miles due north from us and was started yesterday early evening by an arsonist.

Below is a Google Map maintained by the Orange County of all the active fires.


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And after the jump (click "read more..." below), you can see an amazing image captured by a NASA satellite today of Southern California. Read More...

Tags: fire, google, mashup, visualization, nasa, california, orange county

This morning at exactly 4:30am, I awoke to find the house shaking. This is the second quake we've felt at our home in the last couple of weeks. It appears this morning's shake was a 3.7, while the last quake was a 4.7. As a Southern California native, earthquakes are nothing new. And to be honest, I find them interesting.



After being unable to get back to sleep, I figured I'd go check out the quake's epicenter and magnitude. The USGS has great map data for all quakes, including the "mashup" above.
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Tags: earthquake, mashup, google

And now for your viewing pleasure, I give you Orange County, California. OK, not the whole place, but at least a few notable locations such as: San Clemente Pier, Seal Beach Pier, Balboa Fun Zone in Newport Beach, Greeter's Corner in Laguna Beach, Cook's Corner biker bar in Trabuco Canyon and last but not least, the hills around my neighborhood after a pretty good sized fire came through the area.


Click the picture above to view the Orange County, California picture map.

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Tags: google, panoramic, photography, qtvr, mashup, orange county

With mashups continuing to be so popular, I have taken advantage of Google's recently announced capability for embedding Google My Maps into web pages. I've mashed-up some of my photography with Google Maps. Translation: Now you can see exactly where each of my photographs was taken. As of today, I have posted two Picture Maps of my photography: Paris / Loire Valley and Rome.
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Tags: photography, google, mashup

Pretty darn cool. Now in select cities (San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver) you can get a “street view” within Google Maps. So I did a search for Moscone Center, clicked on the “street view” button in the window and a new map marker that looks like a person landed on the page. Move the marker to where you want it, and voila a 360 panoramic image of that location pops up.



As you see above, the photograph is pretty darn good. And just like the 360 degree panoramic photos I take, you can click down in the photo and pan left and right to look around in these Google Maps images. Finally, you can also click on the arrows to move up or down the street.

Tags: technology, google, panoramic, mashup

Via Robin Good’s blog, I tripped across this movie (actually a thesis project by two undergrads at the University of Applied Sciences Ulm, Germany) which poses some questions about Google and their intents. Visit the masterplanthemovie.com website to hear what they have to say. I just downloaded it and will watch it on my iPod next week. What do you think of The Google Master Plan?

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Tags: technology, google

For all you Lost fans out there, I came across an interesting article this morning. If you type the mysterious numbers from Lost (4 8 15 16 23 42) into Google Maps, they correspond to the approximate latitude and longitude of an island in the middle of the Pacific. Hmmm, is that where they are?

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Tags: google, lost

I’m sure you’ve used Google Maps before to find an address or get some driving directions. But how about for a greeting card of sorts? Well, someone has cobbled together a pretty cool site called geogreeting.com which allows you to do just that. How you say? Well, magically (and don’t ask me how) they have found buildings in the satellite imagery used for the site for all the letters of the alphabet. The result? See for yourself:

By clicking on one of the letters, say the “k” in Mike, you will quickly see that building is located in  Salt Lake City, Utah. (Click on the map above to see it --- and where all the other buildings -- are located).
 
Give it a try over at geogreeting.com

Tags: entertainment, google

Wow... so far this is the coolest thing I've seen so far. Overlaying data on the maps. And in this case, census and housing information. Type in a street address, then see the 1, 3 and 5 mile radius bands and the resulting data. Purty cool. Here is a link to the site to see sensus data Google mapped.

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Tags: mashup, google

Google Maps are cool. And now there are a lot of folks figuring out some cool stuff to do with the Google Map APIs. Above, is a Google Map with an overlay of where news events are taking place around the world... the news events courtesy of the BBC news feed.

Check out this "Google Map Mashups" blog to see all the different kind of information and map melding folks are putting together.

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Tags: google, mashup

In honor of the first moon landing that took place 36 years ago today, Google with a little help from the folks at NASA, have maps showing the landing spots for the six Apollo lunar landings. Oh, and be sure and zoom in, some geek humor will be found

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Tags: mashup, google