Writing for Google Earth

 

 

  Good Example of an Introduction to a Google Earth project, written in the Description box of a Placemark

Style

We all adopt different styles in speaking and writing throughout our lives even though we are usually not aware of doing so. For example if a UK policeman walked down a street and came across a robbery he may later describe the event to a judge in a trial like so:

"Whilst I was proceeding down the High Street in a westerly direction, I noticed what appeared to be a robbery occurring..."

This report is appropriate for the situation and will be very different from how the policeman told the story to his friends in the bar:

"Got that Craig Collins again, caught him doing a job on the High Street..."

Writing for Google Earth is no different, an appropriate style should be adopted when writing descriptions for placemarks (and other features that where text is viewed such as polygons). The main guidance points are the same as for writing for the web in general:

  1. Write briefly: users simply will not wade through extended text. For example, the introduction to your Google Earth project should be no more than 3 paragraphs with no more than 3 sentences in each paragraph. If you want to give more information there is nothing wrong with writing a web page and linking it from within the text.
  2. Text Scanning: On the web, users tend to scan text rather than reading in a simple A to Z fashion as they would with a paper novel. Liberal use of sub headings and emphasis is good style as are short paragraphs and sentences.
  3. Personal Style: A friendly, informal style has been shown in studies to be attractive to online users. There are limits to this, whining, ranting or use of SMS text abbreviations is too far.  A good rule of thumb is that language should use 'I' or 'we' where possible.
  4. No acronyms. If you travel by bus in Birmingham UK WMPTE (West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive, pronounced Wumpty) will be as familiar an acronym to you as BBC or FBI but use of this acronym will completely confuse the majority of your users if you use it in Google Earth.

 

iDevice icon Reflection

Rewrite the following text, I invented it for this purpose from a real project about flooding in the Brahmaputra in India. Within the project users are taken on a photo tour of what village life in India close to the Brahmaputra is like and shown evidence that land has been destroyed by the river in recent years - roads end suddenly at the river bank where they once continued onto fields that have now been destroyed by the spread of the river:

"In this Google Earth project an area in northern India around the Brahmaputra river is shown. The project from where the data originated is a joint project by University of Shirley and DIPI, the field work took place mostly in 2007 by A Houseman but some work was done in 2006 by Robert Marley, T Blair and E. Blyton. The work was built on the foundation of early studies by the University of Central Branksome using the early SPOT missions. The Brahmaputra is a majestic river that rises from the snowy wastes and glaciers of the Himalaya tumbling over rocks and waterfalls down to the valley bottoms where it collects into a glorious tract of wide water that slides gently southwards through India and Bangladesh towards the sea watering both those vast nations and the myriads of people who live in them. I just think its sooooo cooooooool!! Cos like we just don't have a river like that where I come from, can u imagine??!! Massive glaciers in the UK! LOL! Despite no help at all from the VERC in terms of funding for this, time has been stolen from other projects to develop this work and show you the 2m SPOT imagery which clearly shows one where roads that previously led to pre-existing fields have been washed away by the Brahmaputra. We didn't even get the money from VERC for the digital camera to take images of daily life around the Brahmaputra, we show these as a photo tour."

Further Reading

Advice on writing introductions via text, via video,

More on writing blogs of which most applies to text in Google Earth projects

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