Since not all users are familiar with the posibilities of the Google Earth user interface, I wanted to create some content with very minimalistic controls. I love travelling, strange places and photography, so I ended up geolocating images from National Geographic Photography.

National Geographic photo gallery

The content layer contains 8 sets of thumbnails, organised in a tabbed menu. You can fly to the location where a photo was taken by clicking a thumbnail or the photo title. A balloon containing a larger version of the photo opens up (clicking this photo takes you to the photo in the National Geographic gallery in your browser) and arrow buttons give you the possibility to fly to the previous or next image or return to the gallery menu. You may have to zoom out a little to get a better view in areas with low res imagery and not all locations were determined very exactly.

Lake Natron, Tanzania

Finding the photo locations was sometimes hard, sometimes easy but always fun. I used a variety of tools: Locator Firefox plugin, Capture Coordinates in GE tool and the Position Finder mapplet.

Bora Bora

View in Google Earth

A long time ago someone pointed me to a website that could generate a map with the number of people sharing your last name and the places where they live in Belgium. This website was familienaam.be and although I liked the website a lot, it was kind of a pity that you couldn't see the exact locations where these people with the same name as yourself where living (becaus of the low resolution and the lack of placenames on the maps).

The occurence of the name Marynissen in Belgium

The occurence of the name Lambrechts in the Netherlands

To overcome this problem and in order to bring a little interactivity into Merkador, I decided to bring familienaam.be to Google Earth. In the same move I did the same with familienaam.nl, which shows you the occurrence of a surname for the Dutch territory. With the search boxes below, you can see where and how many times your surname occurs in Belgium and the Netherlands. Keep in mind that the used statistics date from 1998 for Belgium and from 1993 for the Netherlands.

Tip: make sure the 'Borders and labels' layer is checked in the Google Earth side bar. If the layer is checked, the placenames appaer when you zoom in.

The Thematic Mapping Blog inspired me to experiment a little with the visualization of statistics with 3D-symbols. On the Statbel website I found the population numbers of all Belgian municipalities. Statbel made everything a little more easy by providing geographic coordinates of the municipalities, with a precision of '2.000 meter from the townhouse'.

Every municipality is represented by a cone which height is proportional to the municipalities population. To avoid screen clutter, only the names of the most populous municipalities are shown when zoomed out. Zooming in causes the names of less populous municipalities to show. In the table of content the municipalities are organised by province and are ordered by population.

Population of the municipalities of the Antwerp province

Every municipality is also represented by an icon which, when clicked, opens a balloon that contains the exact total population (2006), the place of the municipality on the national ranking and a graph that shows the number of inhabitants with Belgian nationality and with other nationality.

View in Google Earth

Fogonazos is a very good, bilingual (spanish-english) blog about amazing things in the world. A lot of the articles are linked to a geographic location and I thought it would interesting to visualize these locations on a map.

Click the little arrows in the balloons to move from one place to another and click on the balloon titles to read the original article on Fogonazos. Try switching to the satellite or hybrid view (in the down left corner of the map).

To make things clear: I didn't use a single line of code to generate the map. You don't have to be a programmer anymore to do some amazing thins online with data and maps. I used Zoho Creator and Yahoo Pipes to create a geoRSS and put everyting on a map.

Antonio, the author of Fogonazos, put the Geo Fogonazos map on his terrific blog.

View on a Google Map
View in Google Earth

Old Trafford showing players origins

Modern football is very international: every season players move from one country to another and on the clubs payrolls appaer players from all over the world. This is especially so in the English Premier League, the competition with the richest clubs in the world.

This content overlay shows the origin of the first team players of the 4 biggest clubs: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United.

Origin of Liverpool FC players

You can see the geographical composition of the teams in 3 ways:

• click on the team emblems to see a pie chart of the players nationalities
• check out the lines connecting the team emblems to the players countries of origin. Broader lines mean more players come from that particular country. Enable and disable the clubs you want to visualize in the table of content
• click on the flag icons of the countries to see what players originate from a particular country

Data source: Global football Database

View in Google Earth

More and more international institutions are opening up there statistics databases and publish them online. Most of these statistics have a geographical component and Google Earth is a perfect tool to visualize these statistics.

One of the organizations that made statistics available is UNAIDS, the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. I used Google Earth to visualize the country prevalence rates among adults for 149 countries in 2005 they provide. I used icon size to diferentiate between countries with low, moderate and high prevalence rates and the balloons provide a visual representation of the percentage of adult population infected for each counry.


Sources: UNData, UNAIDS
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The festivals between the 1st and 6th of July
A lot of users don't know that Google Earth can be used to travel through time. I used this capability to create a geocalendar of the Belgian music festivals that take place in the months of June, July and August 2008.

In order to navigate through time, you use Google Earth's timeslider. The timeslider appaers when you've loaded layers containing time data in the program and you move the cursor to the central region at the top of the visualization window. You can see the timeslider in white at the top in the images.

The festivals in August
You can

• drag the timeslider to move through time
• make the timeslider wider and more narrow to adjust the time interval shown
• let the timeslider move automatically and watch time go by

Source festivals dates: festivalnoise.be

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Bolivia has one of the highest biodiversity in the world. One way to protect this biodiversity is the delimitation of protected areas and national parks. Bolivia has 60 protected areas and 21 National Parks. The National Parks cover 182.717 square kilometers and represent 16,6% of the national territory.

This content overlay shows the location of the Bolivian National Parks and provides a description and a link to websites with more info for each Park.

The overlay was first published on Bolivida, my blog about the environment in Bolivia (in Spanish). Google Earth Blog wrote about it, as well as Google Earth ES ( in Spanish).

Sources: Amazonia Boliviana (Spanish), Wikipedia (Spanish).

View in Google Earth

My personal blog is called Blogivia and you'll find it at www.saarmaart.be (in Dutch). A lot of the posts on Blogivia are linked to a specific locatioin en that's why I decided to turn Blogivia into a geoblog.

In order to do that, I tagged geographic location data to the posts of Blogivia (I used Geopress for this, a plugin for Wordpress and Movable Type blogs).

View in Google Earth