MTBGuru blog

Google is of course not the only game in town - Microsoft’s Live Maps and Virtual Earth have made a lot of progress. The latter will even run in 3D from within your browser; only on Windows PC’s though.

Virtual Earth features some nice 3D models (for instance, the Golden Gate bridge, see the example and comparison with GE below) and the fact that it runs in the browser (IE and Firefox) is compelling, though I still prefer the user experience and overall feel of Google Earth (and the vast amount of content available in the latter).

Thanks to the fact that Live Maps/Virtual Earth have recently started to support the KML format, we’ve implemented a way to view your MTBGuru trips in them: look for the links to Virtual Earth right underneath the trip map and in the ‘Share your trip’ section.

Lots of buzz today about the release of a new feature on Google Maps, called My Maps, allowing users to annotate and save maps with their own content: placemarks that may contain links, photos or text (any html really), lines, routes and shapes. GigaOM even talks about the ’smashing of maps mashups’ and the impending doom it may bring to existing third party web apps, as Google’s own offering now seems to take away the wind out of the sails of many of these mashups and mapping startups.

We don’t worry about this but are actually rather excited about it: Google uses the KML format to save the data and feed it back into the Web. This makes for a nice and closer alignment between Google Maps and Google Earth (potentially leading one to become even more philosophical about the future of the Web and the advent of geobrowsers) - for us it means in particular that all KML files generated on MTBGuru are now also available on Google Maps.

As an example, let’s assume we’re interested in bike rides at Skeggs point near Woodside (one of our own local favorites). When we go to Google Maps and type in ‘Skeggs, Woodside CA’ in the main search box, we get the following result (screenshot below, click the image for a larger version):

The content in the left sidebar consists of Google’s featured links (typically these are local businesses that paid to be listed here). Below these, you can see a link titled ‘See user-created content’ (encircled in red). Clicking on this will now lead to a web search for KML files, relevant to this location and search, with the following result (see screenshot):

As MTBGuru creates and publishes KML files on the Web for each public trip and geotagged picture, you may find MTBGuru links appear in the sidebar, with corresponding placemarks on the map, as is the case here.

Click now for instance on the first placemark (’Skeggs Point - Manzanita Overview’) - this points to an ‘overview’ KML file that contains the route, see the next screenshot below:

You can now save these routes and placemarks in Google’s My Maps - click on the placemarks and you’ll see a link appear titled ‘Save to My Maps’ (two examples below):

This basically enables anyone to save and catalog public data on MTBGuru in My Maps, and annotate it with their own content (overlayed routes, additional commentary or pictures), and we’re all in favor of that!

It would become even nicer if Google could give the ‘User-created content’ link a more prominent position in the sidebar upon a search, so it would be easier for people to browse the rich KML content out there on the Web.

Shall we call this “In-flight Aerial Photo Geotagging”?
Or, how to make your boring ten hour transatlantic flight (slightly) more entertaining, using your GPS and camera.

I was lucky to get a window seat on flight KL605 from Amsterdam to San Francisco, and that the weather over the Arctic was fairly clear that day. I had switched on my Garmin Edge 305 early on during the flight but didn’t get reception – two satellites and a reluctant third was all the GPS was seeing.

I tried again hours later, when I saw majestic glaciated fjords and cliffs tens of thousands of feet below me, and yes, this time I got decent reception, so I started tracking and taking photos.

Once home, I created this MTBGuru trip and started finding out what my photos were showing me, using the Google Earth file. Fascinating, the stuff you can learn this way: most of the photos below are of the south shore of Devon Island, Earth’s largest uninhabited island. Its coastline is characterized by steep glaciated cliffs, deep fjords and valleys. The main geographic feature of the island is the Haughton impact crater, in the west part of the island.

And, as the rocky polar desert around the Haughton crater is the closest thing on Earth to what most of the planet Mars looks like, it is also known as Mars on Earth and home of the Mars-Haughton scientific project…

Unfortunately I lost signal again, high above Canada’s Northwest Territories, but I did end up getting about a thousand miles worth of arctic GPS data!

Technorati Tags: geotagging, Google Earth, GPS

When winter attacks, we head to the hills - to ski or ride them!
Skiing and snowboarding seem like a natural fit for mountain bikers and cyclists. Muscle groups are kept in shape and similar adrenaline rushes are generated - and you can throw in backcountry and cross country skiing or snowshoeing to obtain the equivalent of endorphin inducing climbs.

You may have noticed the new trip icon on MTBGuru. Tracking your ski or snowboard days with a GPS can have entertaining results: you can count your runs and calculate how much a run costed you (hint: more than a beer), keep track of your vertical, check your top speed etcetera.

And I’ve been told some backcountry skiers seem to really love Google Earth to scout new runs or areas they plan to ski.

An example of what you can do with the MTBGuru/Google Earth combo: a ski trip in Sierra-at-Tahoe uploaded to MTBGuru and a Google Earth screenshot of it using the resulting KML file.

As a web application, MTBGuru.com obviously lives and works in your web browser, be it FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari or any other browser of your choice.

Meanwhile, Google Earth is increasingly evolving into a ‘geobrowser‘ of its own. While web browsers offer a window on a world of interlinked HTML files, Google Earth does a similar thing with KML files. More and more content is added in the form of KML files and can be accessed through ‘layers’. And recently, a new search capability has been added.

When you type something in the Search box of Google Earth, besides the usual ‘Local business results’ (orange placemarks) you will now also see ‘Web Results’ (green placemarks, see screenshot); based on your current view in Google Earth these ‘Web results’ are populated by placemarks in KML files found on the Internet as search results.

Also KLM files originating from public MTBGuru trips are indexed, as you can see in the example below: when you type in ‘Skeggs Point’ while looking at the San Francisco Peninsula, the picture placemarks of a Skeggs trip appear. If you zoom you’ll see the (red) track as well. In the sidebar you’lll notice the placemarks listed next to green placemark icons as Web Results, below the local business results.
So now you can effectively also search and browse for MTBGuru trips in Google Earth!

Steve and friends were in town again, and they made sure everyone, in particular those attending CES in Vegas, would hear of it - we went for a quick visit to the Moscone Center to see if any interesting things are happening in the Mac world related to GPS and mapping.

Garmin of course announced the OS X version of Training Center, which was being showcased at their booth.

Unfortunately, Training Center is the only thing available on OS X, for the much more useful MapSource there is still a wait.

Google had a pretty large booth, entirely focused on Google Earth and 3D drawing tool Sketchup:

The Mac version of Google Earth was celebrating its first birthday here.

In pre-Google Earth times, 3D Weather Globe & Atlas by MacKiev Software was the ruling 3D mapping software - they’re still around, and offer for a yearly subscription a real-time data stream that contains for instance current weather information.

Garmin competitor Globalsat was showcasing a number of soon-to-be-released devices, one of which looked very much like Garmin’s Forerunner 301/305 model, a wrist watch GPS device targeting outdoor sports and fitness folks. They were teaming up with software makers Routebuddy, who’ve created a nice mapping tool for OS X - it would even be nicer if it would support a standard output format such as GPX; they promised me that was coming soon.

There was of course only one star on this show:

The iPhone’s excellent screen looks perfectly fit to display maps. In fact, it looks so good that I’m quite disappointed that the thing doesn’t have a GPS built in - as I was getting a bit carried away imagining this:

Endo’s could become expensive though…

Technorati Tags: GPS, iPhone, Macworld

We had the opportunity to play a bit with Google Earth Pro and create 3D flyover animations of MTBGuru trips - below is an example that we’ve uploaded to YouTube - the quality of the original .avi file is of course much higher, but this gives you a nice idea of what you can do. We may do more in this area in the future so stay tuned.

The ascent of Mount Tyndall: