After a month or so hiatus, I’m back. I want to wish all a Happy New Year and hope you all had a great holiday season. Although I will definitely continue to update the blog on a (semi) regular basis, it really is quite a bit of work. With that said, I invite anybody else to help contribute to the blog. If you are interested, please contact me using the contact page. I can setup an account for you and you can create your own content. Alternatively, you can submit content to me and I can post.

So…if anybody is interested, please contact me….

Google recently changed the licensing agreement for Google Earth Free. In the past, their agreement has stated that the free version of Google Earth should NOT be installed on any business machine. Although many have ignored the restrictions in the past (after all, who really reads those things???), this was in fact a restriction. As a result, if you installed Google Earth on a machine at work (even if you were using it for personal use), you were in fact breaking the agreement.

With the latest release of Google Earth, Google has changed the agreement. From the new agreement:

1. USE OF SOFTWARE; RESTRICTIONS

Use of Software. For an individual end user, the Software is made available to and may be used by you only for your personal, non-commercial use according to these Terms of Service and the Software documentation. For a business entity user, the Software may be used by you and your employees for internal use according to these Terms of Service and the Software documentation (individual end users and business end users are collectively referred to as “You” herein).

Restrictions. You agree not to use the Software in connection with or in conjunction with a system in a vehicle that offers real-time route guidance or turn-by-turn maneuvers. You agree not to use the Software for any bulk printing or downloading of imagery, data or other content

Although I don’t have the old agreement to compare the wording, "business entity user" is definitely new. James Fee has an interesting entry about the change in agreement on his blog. There’s also an interesting post on the Google Earth Blog where I guess a person from the blog actually wrote to Google directly and received Google’s feedback on the change in the agreement.

Personally, I couldn’t be more excited. The world is already using Google Earth (as are many businesses). Additionally, more and more products are able to create KML. It’s really about time that anybody can (legally) view the KML with Google Earth at work. Now that it’s legal, I’m looking forward to trying out Justin Lokitz’s GeoServer/Google Earth tutorial in greater detail.

I’ve been working on next year’s budget a lot lately. As a result, I haven’t had a lot of time to work with GIS. As my budget tasks wind down, I’m looking for some new things to cover here on http://jeffhobbs.net. Since I haven’t been doing a lot with GeoMedia in the last few weeks - at least not things that I haven’t already covered; I thought I ask you all what you think you’d like me to cover. So, if you can post some comments, I’ll see what I can cover over the next few weeks.

In part, I’m looking to get more into Oracle 11g and its new spatial components. So, for lack of other suggestions, I might head in that direction.

On a side note, recently purchased a book Yahoo Maps Mashups from Amazon.com as we’ve been looking at possibly jumping on the band wagon and seeing if a mashup might serve our sister company in Texas well. Anyway, I have an intern that’s been doing the majority of the leg work. She’s been working with the Yahoo Maps API in conjunction with GeoServer. Although I’m definitely not sure if anything will come out of the testing, the book is really very good for introducing you to Yahoo Maps development.

Will be off on Friday, but will checking the blog…looking for suggestions.

Until Monday….

Been a very busy week thus far. Sorry I haven’t been able to do any updates. Will attempt to do one or two tomorrow. But should be back on track with four or five updates a week starting next week.

All - I really do welcome comments to any of the postings. It make the blog that much more interesting. Please feel free to comment on any topic. I’d really like to get a dialog going on some of these entries!

-Jeff-