Google Analytics API available for your site

Few days ago Google has announced availability of its Analytics API for your own web sites.
This is great news for web administrators and anyone wanting to find out more about the details of web traffic on your web site.

With Google Analytics, you can gather, view, and analyze data about your website traffic. By embedding our basic JavaScript snippet into your pages, you see which content gets the most visits, average page views and time on site for visits, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, and more. You can also use the simple administrative interface to set up goals and filters to control what data goes into your reports based on your business needs. The best part: this sophisticated, full-featured web analytics package is free.

Additional benefit of Analytics API is ability to use Data Export API and then integrate it with your own data.
Indication of power of Analytics API is in fact that FeedBurner has stopped providing the same service in favour of Google Analytics.
With Analytics API one can view various reports detailing visitors (unique visitors, total visits, Pageviews, time on site, bounce rate…) traffic sources separated by direct traffic, referring sites, search engines etc. Not to mention that one can compare two metrics for a parameter or compare to a web site.


If you don’t like the default dashboard or reports you can check out and download have a look at Polaris for Google Analytics.
It provides new view of the dashboard but it is built using Analytics API.


Polaris comes as free version for one web site profile or only $15/year for multiple profiles. It is very low demand on system configuration. Old Pentium III with 512MB should be just fine… as long you have Adobe Air 1.5 installed.
This is definitely easier way to track web site traffic than to collect the log files, import into database and generate reports on your own.

Google Earth 5 beta release includes oceans, history and Mars

Two days ago Google has released beta version of it's very popular application Google Earth. This version is a beta so we should expect some minor changes in final release.

Right after start you can notice some changes. New features are briefly described in start up tips.

Key new features are:

• Oceans
• Historic images
• Mars
• Tours

Here are startup tips about new features.

This is a nice feature and one that was expected to be part of Google Earth sooner or later. After all water covers about 71% of Earth's surface. Mapping of seabed is valuable teaching tool and it provides an insight into greater picture of our planet.

Rendering of water surface is quite nice and animated. Screenshot below can't really show nice surface and moving water but you get the idea.

History view is a nice feature where availble. For example Manhattan has earlest imagery from 1974 right up to 2009. See examples below and have a lool at the top of the map area for time slider.

Some other places (like my home town of Osijek, Croatia) has imagery from 2006 onwards only. Hopefuly this will improve over time like other Google Earth coverage.

 Tours can be created with full control over speed, wait at features, camera tilt and other settings. Given enough time we should see plenty of tours.

 These features are also described in help (accessible on-line) over here. Google Earth can be downloaded from Google Earth main page.


Coverage and review of Google Mars is coming soon.

Feedburner moving to Google

In 2007 Google has acquired FeedBurner and behind the scenes FeedBurner started moving technology, applications, etc to Google servers and data centres. Now they are moving user accounts over to Google. If you have a Google account that it can be very easy. There is a wizard to move your account from FeedBurner. You can keep the transfer page opened and wait for it to finish or check a progress of the transfer later on.

To log on to your moved feeds you have to change URL to http://feedburner.google.com/ and log on with your Google credentials.

As a result of this move you will notice that there is no more Visitors section on your Feedburner Analyze page. Below is a sample of the page.

I haven't tested everything yet so if you find any problems with reading feed from this blog I would appreciate any feedback. You can post a comment or send me an e-mail to ZergOne@gmail.com.

SketchUp 7 released

Google has released a new version of SketchUp today. This is version 7 and it was in development for about two years.

 

Here are most important new features:

 

• crossing lines break automatically
• scaling without stretching
• new interact tool
• search 3D Warehouse from component browser
• download models locally
• create and save custom templates
• new user interface

 

Professional version (one you have to pay for) has some additional features:

• Create Dynamic Component (smart scaling, etc)
• Custom attributes – metadata
• Report generation
• Layout 2 features
• larger models and paper size support
• long live measurements
• curves, editable paths
• move, rotate and scale without changing tools
• export to images
• explode models
• Style Builder
• create custom sketchy styles
• multiple mediums available (marker, pencil, crayon, etc)

 

For download and some videos check out the SketchUp page.

 

Here are some videos from YouTube…

 

What’s new

 

Intersecting lines

 

 

Dynamic components

 

 

There is plenty more videos on YouTube but these are for version 7 specifically.

Have fun creating models and share them on 3D Warehouse!

 

P.S. if you feel like you are up to a challenge then head to Google SketchUp 3D Challenge and get busy.

KML - an open standard

KML (Keyhole Markup Language) was originally developed Keyhole Inc. It was used by their product called Earth Viewer. In 2004 Keyhole Inc. was bought by Google and rest of the story is well known history.

Open Geospatial consortium has announced today that KML is adopted as open standard. This will probably lead to even wider adoption of this format for all sorts of spatial/mapping applications.

Full article is available on the OGC's news page.

Terrain features in Google Maps

Google has added a new feature to its on-line maps - Terrain. What is called a terrain here is known as a hillshade in GIS world. Terrain can be described in a number of ways like listed below;

An area of land having a particular characteristic, such as sandy terrain or mountainous terrain. -GIS dictionary from ESRI

Terrain, or relief, is the third or vertical dimension of land surface. When relief is described underwater, the term bathymetry is used. Topography has recently become an additional synonym, though in many parts of the world it retains its original more general meaning of description of place. - Wikipedia

or check few more definitions from Google.


If you check ESRI's dictionary again here is the definition of the hillshade:

hillshading

1. [map design] Shadows drawn on a map to simulate the effect of the sun's rays over the varied terrain of the land.
   
   
2. [map design] The hypothetical illumination of a surface according to a specified azimuth and altitude for the sun. Hillshading creates a three-dimensional effect that provides a sense of visual relief for cartography, and a relative measure of incident light for analysis.

Penguin's Dictionary of physical geography defines hill-shading as:

A type of shading employed to create an impression of relief on a map. Most examples have the light source shining from the NW, thereby throwing the E-facing and s-facing slopes into shadow. The darker the shading the steeper the slope.

Another term used for this is relief shading. It can be defined as:

• a technique for showing the ups and downs of the land portrayed on a topographic map. The process makes land look three-dimensional by the use of ...
  www.fugawi.com/web/support/glossary.htm
• The use of light and dark tones to depict the form of the land; makes the map appear as if illuminated by the sun, creating highlights and shadows.
  www.maps-gps-info.com/maps-gps-glossary-qr.html

Now about the terrain in Google maps. I like an option to see the terrain but I think it could be rendered differently. It looks like folks at Google have used a higher altitude for Sun when generating terrains then GIS software defaults. I did a quick test on an area in New Zealand - Rotorua (the same area I used in older post about hypsographic shading) and got very similar result to Google's.

Here is a Google map.



This is more or less the same extent shown in the ESRI's ArcMap application with hillshade generated with 60 degrees altitude. As visible here it is very close to the one in Google Maps. In my opinion it is too light, washed out.



If altitude of the Sun is changed to default value in ArcMap (using Spatial Analyst extention) of 45 degrees the following is created. In here features of the terrain are much more prominent and therefore easier to visualize.



One could argue that the later is too dark or too distracting but it will always be the case beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Mapping California fires

Big fires are raging across California. It is all over the news with constant updates. It is interesting to see a number of Internet sites that have maps of the fires.

As expected, big players in mapping have those maps. ESRI's ArcGIS Explorer team posted on their blog how to view fires in ArcGIS Explorer including the sources of data. On this blog there is a comparison screenshot of current fires with ones in 2003 showing threat to areas that were spared in four years ago.

Google also has a map of fires with brief information about fires, evacuation centres, road closures, animal evacuations.

Most common source of data for the fires is MODIS, where you can get images of this year's fires and from 2003.

It is obvious that today companies like ESRI, Google and NASA can provide very useful tools for fire fighters and members of the public. Combine that with news updates and you get quite good system for tracking status of the disasters like this one.

Quick update

ESRI has published a site to support efforts in firefighthing. Site is hosted on ESRI's main site. It also includes links to maps, images, data and people affected.