GA Google Earth and beyond course...

The details of the CPD courses being offered by the GA in the new academic year have been released, and are available for booking now.
Visit the website for details of all the courses.

I'm delighted to say that I will be leading the following days... at various venues around the country from the middle of November through to June 2014...
Hope to see some of you at one of these events...

News on the 3D Warehouse

I picked up this news earlier today via the Google Earth blog.
I've made good use of the 3D Warehouse and SketchUp for some years now... It's at least 6 years since I first started playing with SketchUp and this blog also features some awesome work by Noel Jenkins who has used it with his GCSE groups.

Here's the announcement:

“Hi folks,

With the goal to have every building in the world accurately displayed in 3D, we’ve explored different methods for modeling large areas of our planet in 3D, including technologies like SketchUp, Building Maker and lately 3D Imagery. We’ve decided that in order to pursue the most consistent user experience, we’ll be focusing our resources on the technology that will scale to the entire world and will be discontinuing support of the user generated 3D program.

We’d like to thank all of you who helped form the landscape of Google Earth and helped cities around the globe grow out of the 2D realm, and into the imaginations of virtual 3D explorers everywhere.

Models can still be uploaded to the Trimble 3D Warehouse, where they can continue to be shared with the modeling community, but they will no longer be published to Google Earth starting October 1st, 2013. Existing models will remain visible in Google Earth, until a time when they’re replaced by new models generated for that region. Google Takeout lets you download an archive containing all of your models.

On a personal note: I’ve had the good fortune of being involved in the 3D modeling effort for Google Earth from the beginning, and I’ve watched many of you create collections of amazingly detailed architectural wonders from every corner of the Earth. I’m very thankful to have been along for that ride and to have gotten to know many of you over the years.

With respect and appreciation,

- CraigD and the 3D Modeling Team”

Now it seems that there are changes to the way that 3D models created by people will be accessed.
It may be worth downloading some of the models that you think you will make use of now before they potentially disappear, or get harder to find and access.

For Sale: one slightly used web domain

In 2001, I created a website called 'Mr. P's Geography Pages' which was hosted on the free TRIPOD service.
A few years later, I moved it to web hosts 123Connect and it became 'GeographyPages'.

At the time, other than David Rayner's GeoInteractive and David Robinson's site there were very few Geography-specific websites. This was in the days of Netscape Navigator and dial-up modems chirruping away...

The site had a few thousand visitors a year, but quickly grew to over a million visitors and well over that in terms of page views.
I had to double the bandwidth, and then again and again....
The website still gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a year,  although I 'archived' it in 2008 when I joined the Geographical Association.

If anyone is interested, the domain name is for sale.... one slightly shop-soiled URL

(Not that I anticipate anyone will be for a moment....)

The site will be disappearing shortly, so grab your favourite bits while you can.
The end of an era...
And the start of another in a month's time....