After my last post on Microsoft not needing an “Earth” or “globe”, I got to thinking a little more. My original thinking was that the Globe as a GIS data visualization tool is somewhat limited – really only of use for very large datasets (nation, continent scale or larger). As such, Microsoft is not missing much without one.
But, as a visualization tool for other inherently spatial data (my thinking was related to news stories), it’s a very compelling interface. So, just as I am jotting this down, I found that Stefan Geens (whose post on MS buying ESRI started this all off), posted a comment , indicating that this same concept was behind his belief that Microsoft needs a “globe”. Not that Microsoft needs enterprise GIS, but rather that a global information visualization construct may be the next “browser”. Well – that saved me some writing… So, I wanted to check out how this is coming along, and ogleearth.com is a great place to start. I quickly found “GoogleGlobe Assistant”, an Earth add-in that pulls news feed stories from BBC & CNN among other things. While this is still pretty rough around the edges, it’s a very good starting point for a new information construct. I would love to see News.Google.com integrated into Earth. The ability to select categories of stories, or keywords, and have those things show up on the globe automatically would be amazing. And I don’t think it will be long before it’s a reality.Damn! blog-time runs pretty qucik – apparently this has been around for a few days – here’s a link to a KMZ file that is a RSS connection for the Washington Post (more about this here…). It seems that I’m not the only one with this idea… This is a screen shot of it in action…
Besides being really cool, I hope this catches on so that more people have an expanded world view. As a Canadian living in the US, I’ve always found that international news on traditional media outlets is limited at best. When there is news from outside the US, its either in the context of a horrible tragedy (Tsumani / Earthquake / Famine), or it’s related to the US bombing / invading / threatening something. In either case, it’s a quick bit, and then back to the sensational crap of the moment (Jackson Trial, Paris Hilton etc). If the “globe” as an information construct takes off for news viewing, perhaps people may realize
a) that the world is a little bigger than they thought, and
b) that there is something else going on out there.
