Like many other people, I was very dismayed to learn that Google was discontinuing Google Reader. I had hoped that Google would not push through with their plan, but given Google’s history and resolve (I think the decision to shut down Reader was not taken lightly and was likely debated internally at length by Google management) I eventually accepted Google Reader’s fate.

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More than a year ago, I blogged about the very detailed 3D buildings in U.P. Diliman that can be explored in Google Earth. And a year before that, Mike Gonzalez shared his top 10 3D Philippine sights in Google Earth. Well, I recently installed Google Earth 6 and decided to check out the current state of the 3D buildings and models in Metro Manila. The verdict? I’m quite impressed!

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I was meaning for a long time to blog about the existing 3D building models in the Philippines found in Google Earth and the Google SketchUp community, but Mike Gonzalez beat me to it last year by listing his top 10 best Filipino 3D sights in Google Earth. I agree with his assessment that U.P. Diliman has the best set of 3D models right now. Bacolod is also getting some 3D-modeling love so if Mike ever updates his list, I’m sure the City of Smiles will get prominent placing.

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The third week of November looks to be an exciting month for Web enthusiasts as there are three Web-related offline events happening within eight days of each other. The first one, targeted to Web designers, is the Form Function & Class Mini Web Design Conference this Saturday, the 14th. The second event, intended for Web developers, is the Google Technology Users Group meetup on November 17. The third, for plain old Web surfers, is the Five Years of Firefox in Manila party on the 21st.

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For the most part I’m a big Google fanboy (well except for some things here and there). And because I’m nominally a web developer, I certainly will try to attend as many developer-oriented Google events as I can. The first event I attended was the Google TechTalk last November 2007 and the second one was the first ever Google DevFest Manila back in November 2008. So it should not come as a surprise that I turned up at the Google-Globe Developer Workshop last June 20. This event was held at Tech Portal of the really, really, really cool U.P.-Ayala Land TechnoHub in U.P. Diliman (see a rough map at OpenStreetMap ). Did I mention that the TechnoHub is really cool?

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It’s amusing that about a week after I derided Google’s Mapping Party concept, I was invited to attend one by Aileen Apolo, the Philippine country representative of Google, in behalf of Dante Varias and Leonel Foronda, who are apparently the two most productive Filipino Google Map Maker contributors. The event happened last June 3 at the Bubba Gump restaurant in Greenbelt 3 and it was attended by local bloggers and developers. (I guess I was invited because I am a blogger, a developer, and a Map Maker contributor all at the same time!)

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I love Google and all, but allow me to be snarky yet again at Google for introducing their Mapping Party Kit late last month. A Google Mapping Party is an event where you invite people to a venue, give them a presentation on Google Map Maker, and them let them try their hand at mapping their locality. The Mapping Party Kit is a simple reference website for anyone who wants to throw a Mapping Party. The site contains sample invitation letters, an agenda example, a presentation, and links to other resources such as Google blog posts about Map Maker.

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I’ve mentioned quite a few times here and elsewhere that I consider Bonifacio Global City as the place in Metro Manila that is undergoing the most drastic development (like roads come and go and there’s always a building under construction somewhere). Because of that, I think that how various maps depict this district is one of the best indicators in gauging how updated any such map of Metro Manila is. For instance, I analyzed the 2007 edition of the Citiatlas Metro Manila atlas by examining its coverage of Bonifacio Global City.

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Yuga once asked back in 2007, “Google, where’s our street maps?” Now the answer has come less than two years later when majority of the data contributed by Filipinos to Google Map Maker was recently pushed to Google Maps sometime in the latter half of February (see the official graduation announcement). To celebrate this milestone, Google held a press conference about two weeks ago. However, while what’s there right now in Google Maps for the Philippines is a vast improvement over the really laughable data before, there’s still room for improvement and Google needs to up its ante.

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Google Earth 5 was released last February 2 via a much-hyped launch event at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The special feature that was unveiled (to no one’s surprise because of the many clues released prior to the event) is the arrival of Google Ocean, which lets users explore the world’s oceans in 3D. What was unexpected were the three other major features added: Google Mars, easy KML tour recording, and—the one I’m most interested in—historical imagery.

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It’s been a pretty interesting year for amateur map making using crowdsourcing techniques. OpenStreetMap has been going strong while Google has released Map Maker just last June while Wikimapia followed up with their Beta website. I came across these two interesting and remarkably similar maps showing the extent of efforts in OpenStreetMap in the past year and Google Map Maker since its launch.

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As if Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap were not enough, Wikimapia had publicly opened their Beta website, which is yet another crowdsourced road mapping project, early last month. It seems that they had a private beta going months before and they have not opened it to the public until November. (I learned of the announcement from Google Maps Mania.)

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Thanks again to Andrew, I got to attend another Google event for developers (the last one was the TechTalk last year) and this is the first ever Google DevFest Manila, which was held last November 7 at the CSWCD Auditorium in U.P. Diliman. Unlike last year’s event which was mostly a short meet-and-greet and roadshow affair with two Filipino American Google engineers from Mountain View, last month’s DevFest was a really long conference where plenty of Google engineers came not only to talk about various APIs of Google, but also to give demonstrations as well. Developer attendees were encouraged to bring along their laptops as well and to try out the demos for themselves via the intermittent free Wi-Fi from both Globe and Smart. (I actually came armed with two ASUS notebooks: my old A6500R laptop and my Eee 701 netbook.)

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I was invited to attend the Google Map Maker Power User’s Launch last October 7 at the Makati Shangri-la Hotel. If you know me, you’d know that I won’t refuse such an event. Unfortunately, I arrived at the venue from work a bit too late for the presentation, but I managed to get to talk with Dickson Seow, Corporate Communications Head of Google Southeast Asia (based in Singapore), and Jason Chuck, Product Marketing Manager for the APAC region (based in Hong Kong), regarding my questions and opinions about Google Map Maker. Apparently, Dickson had been looking forward to meet me and Jason had even read some of my blog posts. I guess Aileen Apolo, the Google Philippines Country Representative, had briefed them about me.

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Here’s a couple of interesting development on the Google Geography department. First, the quick news item: Google has dropped Navteq as one of its mapping data providers (i.e., companies that provide street, point-of-interest, and routing data) in favor of continuing to do business with Tele Atlas. This is not unexpected since Navteq was recently acquired by Nokia and the industry movement of these two companies in the past year have made them competitors of each other. This latest move by Google was first revealed last Friday, September 19, in a blog post by Mike Blumenthal. The announcement from Google Maps Guide Adam contained this snippet:

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There’s still no official announcement from Google (Update, September 6: now, there’s a blog post), but readers of Google Earth Blog noticed new and updated satellite imagery in Google Earth. As usual, there’s a lag time before the data is updated in Google Maps so you won’t see the new imagery on the web yet (well, except if you have the Google Earth browser plugin).

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Due to the currently ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia, it has been noticed that Google, as of now, doesn’t have any data at all on the country in Google Maps. No cities, towns, roads, or points of interest—just a blank region. This lack of data also affects Georgia’s neighbors Azebaijan and Armenia. Conspiracy theorists thought that Google censored the data either at the behest of the government of Georgia or Russia, but Google was quick to dispatch a blog post saying that they didn’t have data at all in the first place. Their reason? They “simply weren’t satisfied with the map data [they] had available.”

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I’ve been playing around with creating PhotoOverlays in Google Earth, and I must say, making them is hard. PhotoOverlays are a new feature in Google Earth 4.2 wherein you can place photos in 3D space such that it lines up with the underlying view in Google Earth. Note that this is different from an Image Overlay feature wherein you take a graphic (like a map) and drape it over the terrain. Shown below is how a PhotoOverlay I created looks like floating in space.

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Google versus Nokia? Any significant competition between these two companies was an unlikely thing a year ago since one is primarily known as an Internet service company and the other a mobile hardware company, two very different but complementary industries. Well, the events of the past several months proved that things are coming to a head and Google is now in a market battle with Nokia. If you recall, several local bloggers got to talk with Nokia Philippines last May and it was revealed that Nokia wants to venture into the online content service industry, which brings it near to Google’s territory.

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Late last month, Google announced and released Map Maker, a service that lets users add streets and other underlying data that will eventually make its way to the actual map tiles that you see in Google Maps. To put it—maybe too—simply, it’s like Wikipedia for Google Maps. But this is not like Google’s My Maps service, which lets you create custom maps by adding a layer of data on top of the underlying Google maps imagery. Map Maker lets you update that underlying imagery itself. Interestingly, you can trace over the satellite imagery and this is a boon for budding mapmakers since Google has the best worldwide satellite imagery coverage among all the online mapping services.

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First of all, read Ferdz’ blog post. Then, if you have Google Earth, open this KML. Or if you don’t have Google Earth, you can check the KML out in Google Maps but take note that Google Maps doesn’t rotate image overlays so what you’ll see there won’t be accurate. Anyway, a screenshot of the KML as seen in Google Earth is shown to the side.

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Wow! There’s no official word yet from Google but it seems that they have updated their satellite imagery data in both Google Earth and Google Maps at the same time early tonight. Usually, there’s a lag time: Google first updates the imagery in Google Earth before porting it over to Google Maps between a week to a month later. I only recall one time that they pushed data at the same time. Well, this update is the second time this month. Update: well, the data seemed to have appeared in Google Earth about at least three days ago and was updated in Google Maps tonight.

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It’s been seven months since new high-resolution satellite imagery was released in Google Earth for the Philippines. So on May 13, Google updated their Google Earth data with tons of new and updated satellite imagery for our country via their usual question and answer blog posts.

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“I was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time…” so starts the intriguing short story set in the United Kingdom and told via the Google Maps API. “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cummings is the first story of Penguin Books’ We Tell Stories, a collection of six stories by six authors and released in six weeks (hmmm, 666?). We Tell Stories aims to do storytelling using the various tools, interactive or not, Web 2.0 has to offer; looking at the two stories so far released, the first uses Google Maps API, while the second uses blogs and Twitter. Interesting, isn’t it?

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A year ago, I blogged about the Google SketchUp 3D campus competition wherein college and university students try to create the best-looking model of their institution’s campus. The grand prize was a trip to Alice’s Wonderland—er, Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters. Unfortunately, the contest was only open to U.S. and Canadian students. Seven lucky teams from schools ranging from Stanford University to Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering won the prize. (There was also a similar succeeding contest for Australia and New Zealand.)

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One big productivity step I took a few months ago was to organize the subscribed feeds I had in Google Reader into folders by priority. The result is that I no longer feel overwhelmed if I have hundreds of unread items in my feed reader, and I now able to use my time more wisely by scanning those feeds that I really am most interested in.

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Thanks to Andrew I was able to snag a slot at the recently held Google TechTalk, which was held in Makati last Monday, November 19. This event was organized by Philippine Google Country Consultant Aileen Apolo. Two Filipino American Googlers from the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA, Jay Aguilar and Franklin Naval, visited the country to promote awareness about some of the tools and resources Google has made available for developers.

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There are two technology fields that Google has recently entered and will prove to be interesting battle grounds: one is the cross-platform mobile application development space, and the other is the social-networking Web application space. Google entered the former by announcing the Android platform and launching the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which includes Intel, Motorola, and T-Mobile, and the notable absence of Microsoft, Apple, and Nokia. Google forayed into the latter field by releasing the OpenSocial API with notable partners Friendster, hi5, imeem, MySpace, Six Apart, and LinkedIn, and the notable absence of Facebook.

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It’s been quite fashionable in the past week to talk about one’s experience with Google’s Western Union AdSense Payment option. For instance, here are several stories coming from the local bloggers:

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Shown to the right is a satellite image of the historic Barasoain Church. Unexpectedly, this is from Microsoft’s Live Maps. Yahoo! Maps also has the same satellite image but with a different kind of image post-processing. Google Maps, on the other hand, doesn’t have any high-resolution satellite imagery of this place of worship. In fact, their imagery of the spot is quite a tease, just being 500 meters short of the nearest hi-res area—and that hi-res area is actually one of the very first places in the Philippines to have hi-res satellite images in Google Maps. Update (September 6, 2008): Google now has satellite imagery of the Barasoain Church.

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After the Google Toolbar PageRank kerfuffle last week in which a lot of high-profile sites and blogs got demoted a rank or two, it seems everything is back to normal and the ranks are back to what is mostly expected by people. The mass-demotion last week was the talk of the international blogosphere and whether the temporary drop was just an update glitch or a slap on the wrist by Google to the sites that game the PageRank system (PR) is still a question to be answered since Google is keeping mum. A lot of theories are being thrown around and the mainstream conclusion is that the visible PageRank value (i.e., the Toolbar PageRank number) should not used as a sole criterion for a website’s worth. This whole brouhaha is quite a big thing since there is quite a big Internet sub-economy built around the concept of PR (with sites like Text Link Ads and Pay Per Post).

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After a couple of measly updates to the satellite imagery in Google Earth for the Philippines last June and July that only saw Puerto Princesa City and the western shores of Laguna de Bay updated, we now have a lot of new high-resolution satellite pictures all over the Philippines, and around the world, in fact. See Google’s announcement.

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I had been using Bloglines as my feed reader/aggregator since 2003 before I completely switched over to Google Reader a few months ago. I tried Google Reader early last year but it didn’t stick with me then. What made me decide to switch now? I got sick and tired of the way Bloglines marked every unread item as read when selecting a feed. If you neglect to check your feeds for a while and one of them adds tons of new items, you’d be forced to invest a lot of time to catch up on that feed if you don’t want to miss anything.

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Yay! I have finally reached the 100-sight milestone on my secondary blog, Vista Pinas, where I take you on a virtual tour of Philippine-related locations in the Philippines and around the world via the satellite imagery found in Google Maps.

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Last month, Yuga is lamenting the lack of street maps of the Philippines in Google Maps. Well, Google announced via their LatLong blog that they have added street maps for 54 countries including the Philippines. Previously, only Thailand and Singapore had street-level maps in Google Maps in Southeast Asia. Well, excited I checked out Metro Manila in Google Maps and came out extremely disappointed. See the screenshot below.

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I was idly looking through my blog’s stats in Google Webmaster Tools and came upon this list of top search queries that led to my site:

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Advertising on the web is here to stay, and that’s a fact of life. Otherwise, there’d be a whole lot less free services and content for us to read. In exchange for free access to a whole lot of websites, we have to accept that most of these websites will have ads.

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I really try to avoid back-to-back Google posts, but this new feature/product/service by Google is too good to pass up posting about. Download the latest version (4.2) of Google Earth then switch to the Sky view by clicking the astronomy icon in the toolbar or selecting the “Switch to Sky” menu option under the View menu. You’re now presented with a view of the night sky!

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It was inevitable that Google has now made Google Maps much more shareable. It’s now as easy to post your very own pannable and zoomable Google Maps in your blogs and websites as you do with YouTube videos. Just browse Google Maps as usual, find the location you want to showcase, add markers via the “My Maps” tab, and then click on “Link to this page” link beside the upper-right corner of the map. Copy the contents of the second textbox and paste it to your blog or website. It’s that easy! You can find more information and examples at the Google Lat-Long Blog.

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Almost two months after Google updated their satellite image data for Google Earth, they have again updated their data last July 26. If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you would expect me to keep on top of these updates.

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Check it out! When the guys over at Google Sightseeing decided to let their readers write their own posts for Google Sightseeing instead of their usual method of soliciting suggestions, I immediately took the opportunity to get the first ever Philippine spot featured on their popular site (and to plug my blog and Vista Pinas as well ). Anyway, the Philippine spot I wrote about is the Mactan Shrine in Cebu. I figured that because this historic landmark features an obelisk dedicated to Ferdinand Magellan, whose expedition is the first to successfully circumnavigate the world, a write-up about the shrine would appeal to an international audience.

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Playing catch up with Google Maps, Yahoo! last year added satellite imagery to their Yahoo! Maps website. Naturally, being the map geek that I am, I checked out their offering last year and was disappointed to find out that they didn’t have any high-resolution satellite imagery for the Philippines, unlike Google Maps which had some back then.

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Have you seen those recent Globe TV commercials that featured Kim Atienza on location? I noticed that they showed a map of the Philippines and zoomed in on the locations where the “reporter” was. I suspected that Globe used Google Earth to create those zooming scenes and I only became definitely sure when they zoomed into the satellite image of an under-construction Market! Market! in Taguig in one of their commercials.

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As anticipated by Google Earth enthusiasts, Google has updated its public satellite imagery in Google Earth (see the announcement). I checked in Google Earth and it seems that in the Philippines, only one new Digital Globe image was added: Honda Bay in Puerto Princesa City, Palawan. Shown below is the world-class Dos Palmas Arreceffi Island Resort in Palawan.

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Oh. My. God. This has got to be the coolest thing I have ever seen on Google Maps by far. Google has now integrated street-level panoramic views of practically every street in 5 U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas. The photos only require a flash player, is zoomable, pannable 360°, and it’s interactive! You could practically do a virtual drive around these cities! It’s almost as good as being there.

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After months of planning and setting up, I am extremely pleased to announce that we have finally launched Vista Pinas, my second blog where I give you a virtual tour of Filipino sights as can be seen from satellite imagery found in Google Maps and Google Earth. It’s like Google Sightseeing done Pinoy-style!

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Due to the recent announcement of Google’s top SEO guy Matt Cutts of a way to report to Google sites who sell links on their pages, there has been a lot of online discussion about the whole economy of buying and selling links and how it affects search engine rankings, with particular emphasis on small people like bloggers who use text links from brokers like Text Link Ads as a way to get additional income. For instance, Yuga touched a bit on the topic by talking about links from WordPress themes.

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The Google/GIS blogosphere is having a field day with the Google Maps easter egg instructing you to “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean” at a distance of 5,572 kilometers (taking 29 days) if you want to drive from any point in the continental USA and Canada to Europe. See for instance any of these posts: Kottke, Google Blogoscoped, Metafilter, and The Map Room.

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Google has updated their data for Google Earth and Google Maps last February 28. In terms of Philippine content, I only see just a few more areas with high-resolution satellite imagery care of Digital Globe. Below is my updated hi-res coverage map. (See the previous version.) The blue spots show areas with added hi-res imagery. The red spots indicate places with already existing hi-res coverage.

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Last weekend, I played around with the public domain data obtained by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission or SRTM. I wanted to use this data to create topographic maps that I can contribute to Wikipedia.

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Google is having a contest for building the best school campus in 3D using Google SketchUp. The grand prize is an all-expense-paid trip to the Google Campus in Mountain View, CA. Too bad the contest is only open for residents of the U.S. and Canada.

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Following-up on my previous post about the updated satellite imagery in Google Maps and Google Earth, below is version 2.0 of the Philippine hi-res coverage that I have shown before. The bright blue spots on the map below indicate the areas that have added high resolution satellite imagery. The red spots indicate the areas that already have hi-res photos.

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Hooray! Due to the most recent update (October 3) of Google Maps/Earth satellite imagery data, we now have a seamless, and more importantly, cloudless, satellite view of practically the whole Metro Manila! Finally, the Central Business District of Makati is now shown in all its glory! For example, here’s PBCom Tower, the country’s tallest building.

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It really seems like Google is an engineer’s dream place, that is if you can hurdle the tough hiring procedures. Read this post by Philipp Lenssen about insider looks into the world of Google.

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That was fast! Via Google Maps Mania I read that Google Maps now has the same new satellite imagery that I mentioned before. Wheee!

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Since there’s a lead time between the introduction of new satellite imagery in Google Earth and its deployment to Google Maps, you can use the lead time to spot interesting before-and-after scenes. And we’re in the middle of such a lead time right now, due to the recent update in Google Earth.

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Well, sorry for the Google Earth-related posts but I’m just excited. Hehehe. Anyway, I explored the Philippines on Google Earth and compiled all the areas with high-resolution images into the image below. The red spots (they’re not exact) mark those areas.

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When I found out that Metro Manila, among other Philippine cities, have hi-res satellite imagery in Google Earth, I lamented the fact that I still don’t have broadband access since Google Earth works much much better on when you have fat data pipes. (See this thread over at SkyscaperCity (old dead link) for a whole bunch of Google Earth screenshots.)

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I believe I have created the first Philippine-related Google Maps mashup that is more than just placing points on a map. I remembered recently that I have scanned before an aerial photography plate of the University of the Philippines, Diliman area from the early 90s. (These plates are used by U.P. Geodetic Engineering students in their courses.) So last night, I had this brilliant idea to create a custom map in Google Maps with the aerial photography as a new map type. So now I’m proud to present my University of the Philippines, Diliman Map Mashup located at my dormant U.P. community site ASwalk.net (which I plan on reviving soon). Please select the “Aerial” map type to view the “new” imagery.

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DigitalGlobe, one of Google’s sources for satellite imagery already has a composite image of Metro Manila in high resolution. This imagery was taken in 2004 and the next one will be in 2007. When will Google incorporate this into Google Maps/Earth?

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Yay! Due to a recent update of Google Maps’ data, satellite imagery is now at par with what Google Earth has. What does this mean? We now have hi-resolution imagery of five cities in Mindanao! We can now spy on Cagayan de Oro, Davao City, Cotabato City, Butuan City, and Bislig City. More playing grounds for my other blog.

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I’ve added a beta Map page to my second blog, Tanawing Pinoy, (now named Vista Pinas). Like the original Google Sightseeing, I plan this page to be an interactive embedded map pointing to all or a subset of the featured sights from the blog.

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I’m proud to introduce to you Tanawing Pinoy, my weblog dedicated to highlighting Pinoy sights from Google Local. Well-versed web surfers will recognize that this blog is really just a localized Pinoy version of the popular Google Sightseeing blog.

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If you’ve ever tried phrase searching in Google then try this query:

site:alistapart.com "ever trust the 8-bit representations"

Got one result? It should lead you to an A List Apart article entitled “The Trouble With EM ’n EN.” Notice that the highlighted phrase search in the results page has the word “don’t” in front of it. So if we add that word to the phrase in the search query, we should get the same result, right?

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In a reference to the oft-mentioned phrase, “I can see my house from here!” I’d like to show you the Google Maps Satellite view of the Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Philamlife Village, where my family goes to mass every Sunday. (See also my earlier post on Google Maps Satellite view).

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This is really cool! Google last year acquired this satellite imaging company called Keyhole. And this year, Google launched Google Maps, one of the slickest webapps I’ve ever seen. People probably saw this coming but Google recently combined the two technologies and added satellite views to their Google Maps offering.

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I’ve actually had a Gmail account for about ten days now. But it is only now that I’ve tried to really play with it. I’m impressed. Now I understand why people have been raving that it feels very much like a desktop application. The response is quite fast, even on the dial-up connection I’m using.

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