My Google Map Blog

Every year for the past seven years, the folks at Google Sightseeing have run a series of posts for "Volcano Week". It's a fun series to follow, and they're wrapping up this week after covering Mount Etna, Colima, Piton de la Fournaise and Sakura-jimi, seen below.

A few years ago during their Volcano Week series, Google Sightseeing writer Noel Ballantyne wrote an article about Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. Noel has recently decided to climb the mountain and will do so in January, 2013! He will be climbing to help raise funds for Focus Ireland, a registered charity that works to prevent people becoming, remaining or returning to homelessness. You can contribute to Noel's fundraising efforts via his donation page.

At nearly 6,000 meters, climbing Kilimanjaro is a very ambitious goal and we wish Noel the best. You can explore the mountain for yourself in Google Earth by loading this KML file.

Over the years we've shown you some amazing 3D models from a variety of people including Artur Mazur, Guillaume Godin, PeterG, Andy Dell and many others.

Today we're going to show you a few pieces from Steve Cline, who has done some excellent work as well.

The first is from Lancaster Bible College in Lancaster Pennsylvania. They've opened up a few new buildings and Steve has modeled virtually the entire campus:

He's also modeled a handful of famous mansions in Newport, Rhode Island. The Preservation Society of Newport owns and manages these amazing historical mansions for tourists to visit. Some famous American Industrialists, such as the Vanderbilt family, constructed these mansions as summer "cottages". A great example is "The Breakers", shown here:

It's largely due to the work of people like Steve (and thousands of others) that Google Earth is such an amazing product. That said, it'll be interesting to see how things shift in the coming years as Google continues to roll out the new 3D Imagery, which essentially replaces the hand-crafted models that have been built by these users. It'll be interesting to see how Google chooses to roll the 3D Imagery out to the desktop versions of Google Earth later this year -- will we still have access to these great models, or will they simply become inaccessible in areas that have 3D imagery available? We should find out in the next few months.

In any case, great work Steve!

Here at Google Earth Blog we get a few questions almost every day through our contact form. We encourage you to use if it you ever have a question about any aspect of Google Earth.

With that in mind, here are a few of the most common ones we get:

Do you have imagery for August 15, 2011 at 3:50pm? My house/car/business was broken into and we want to catch the thieves?

Sadly, this is incredibly unlikely. Because of the way that Google Earth imagery works, any given area is typically only updated once every few years. The odds that they captured imagery at the precise moment you need it, along the the odds of the imagery actually capturing a detail that helps with the investigation, are very remote.

My imagery in my city is 3 years old. When will it be updated again?

The short answer is that we have no idea, as Google doesn't release that kind of information ahead of time. We recommend that you sign up to be notified when new imagery is released in your area, and be sure to keep an eye on the "historical imagery" as it's sometimes newer than the base imagery.

How can I get my personal information removed from Street View (license plate, etc)?

Send an email to maps-legal@google.com with your name and the location of the image in question and they'll respond with more information. Note that in most countries Google is legally allowed to capture imagery from public locations and they already blur out faces, so there are relatively few legal situations that they'll take action on.

Information about my street/business/park/etc is missing or outdated.

Head into Google Maps, right-click on the area in questions and choose "report a problem". Once the data has been corrected in Google Maps, it will propagate over to Google Earth soon after. Here is more information about the problem reporting process.

How can I get a live streaming view of Google Earth?

In short, you can't. Despite what you see in movies like "Men in Black", the government can't either. While it seems likely that we'll have a live-streaming Google Earth in the coming decades, the technology simply isn't there yet. Not only would you need thousands of additional satellites capturing imagery (and the corresponding servers on the ground to process it in real-time), but there are also images with daylight, weather, angles, etc. Beyond that, I'm sure we'll see issues with privacy begin to arise as well.

We again refer you to the "about Google Earth imagery" post to see how complex it is to add imagery to Google Earth. Having to cover all 57.5 million square miles of earth in real-time will be quite a challenge, but one that I know engineers are looking forward to tackling.

Be sure to check out the full basics section for more answers, don't hesitate to ask if you have other questions.

There are a lot of great tools online to help track storms such as Hurricane Isaac. Google Maps Mania listed a few, and James Fee posted a sizable list.

Adding to the toolset, Google has now launched their Crisis Response Map for Isaac, which includes public alerts, weather radar, path predictions and much more.

If you're in Google Earth, there are some great tools available to you in there as well. By opening the [Weather] layer, you can turn on near-real-time [Clouds] and [Radar] layers, which show the storm gaining strength:

If you turn on the main [Places] layer in Google Earth, a small hurricane icon will appear in the center of the storm. By clicking the icon you can view news, advisories, as well as three and five day path predictions.

We'll be sure to update this post as we learn of any other tools for tracking this storm.

The start of the War of 1812 just reached its 200th anniversary, and Ian Brown at Google Sightseeing has written a few posts on how to explore famous battlefield and memorial locations in Google Earth and Street View.

The first part of their series covers locations in Canada, including "Fort York" in Toronto, which had been formed to defend the capital city (and is 3D in Google Earth):

They go on to show a variety of landmarks around the country, including various monuments such as this one for British Major General Sir Isaac Brock, clearly visible in Street View:

The second part of the series travels south of the border to the United States, where Ian again points out a remarkable number of battlefields, monuments and other historic areas. A great example is the USS Constitution in Boston Navy Yard, which is in excellent 3D in Google Earth:

In all, the two posts do an excellent job of using Google Earth, Google Maps and Street View to highlight some of the historic locations from the War. You can explore further by reading the full blog posts (Canada, USA) or download the KML files to see the featured locations in both countries (Canada, US).