Tuneglue: Mashup for Similar Music
I just ran across TuneGlue, a Flash-based mashup for finding similar music via Last.fm and Amazon (UK) APIs. You give the tool an artist name and it generates a cool web-like structure linking together artist names. You can expand the web by finding similar artists to the similar artists, and it will interlink any of the existing artist bubbles that appear. It also integrates with the Amazon API, allowing you to browse any artists albums and tracklists from Amazon. It reminds me of the digg swarm Flash visualization tool for digg.
via ProgrammableWeb
Marine Charts for Google Earth
A company called EarthNC is now providing a CD with 600 NOAA ENC charts and 70 Army Corps of Engineers Inland charts. NOAA’s nautical chart data is provided for free electronically and EarthNC has translated it into an intelligent KML format to be used as a Google Earth overlay. The screenshots look pretty interesting:
Depth Soundings
Vector Data and Intelligent Zooming
Google Earth has really become a powerful tool, even for marine use. With a small laptop or portable computer and a cheap GPS (and an EVDO card if you’re feeling saucy), fisherman, sailors, and recreational boaters can create an advanced data storage and tracking system for themselves. One could store anything from good fishing spots to sailing routes to nice island campsites. And with something like EarthNC’s product, your nautical charts could be obsolete (and we all hate handling unwieldy and sometimes non-waterproof charts on a trip, especially in the rain). I hope that Google, DigitalGlobe, TerraXplorer and other imagery vendors get more into the marine imaging arena. There’s some crude bathymetry data on Google Earth, but for inland imaging, they could do better. This is a very compelling product. It’s nice to see folks really adopting the KML format and doing amazing things with it.