Google Earth “GIS” – Part 1
I've been working a lot with Google Earth (GE) recently. In fact, it's a running joke at work these days that Google Earth is a panacea the be-all-end-all of everything, and around the SSRC I'm your GE go-to guy. This is mostly because our boss likes to show off some of our research that I've made available for viewing in GE. For many people, the visualization of "unseen" social science data in this new way is quite an eye-opener; most are quite impressed and have never seen anything quite like it. And to be fair, some of these people have not seen a lot of social data mapped much at all. Sure, many have seen the maps in newspapers that show how bad the obesity "epidemic" is in the US (led by Mississippi of course), but GIS use in the social sciences is still somewhat limited. Don't get me wrong here, GIS has been used by social scientists for a long time now, but I think that the percent who are using it effectively is still relatively small. At least that's what I've gathered from the few conferences I've been to and from the people traveling through my office to see the "Google Earth demo."
There's a great debate going on in the GIS world of whether or not Google Earth is or is not "GIS," of whether it's good or not for the GIS profession(al), whether it should be embraced or shun, and of course what better alternatives are available.
Scalable web applications – Google App Engine and Amazon S3
Google announced today the beta release of Google App Engine. This application engine is designed to facilitate the quick development and deployment of new web apps. They only released it to the first 10,000 people to sign up, but I'm sure that will expand before too long. This service seems to be in competition with Amazon S3. I think these are really exciting developments, even though I'm not so sure I'll be using them anytime soon. Essentially, they both allow really cheap storage and processing for all your web applications, and they scale with you. At least, Google's will eventually...starting out they are offering 500Mb per month of storage space and 5 million page views for free with pay service and expandability to come at some point. Amazon S3 is a pay service from the start, but the prices are really quite cheap.