Google Building Maker released for Philadelphia, 49 other cities

So where do you begin? Google Building Maker was released yesterday for 50 cities, including Philadelphia.

Google is offering up Web-based tools to citizens that would help move forward the company’s ambitious plans to have 3D representations of every building in the world.

Philadelphia is one of 50 cities worldwide and just 21 in the United States that are part of the first wave of Google Building Maker, as the program was described in a company release from yesterday. Building Maker is a way to create geo-located 3D models of buildings that would be visible in Google Earth, with the intention of creating an impressively detailed Web atlas, though criticism already surrounds, as always, the heavy reliance on free citizen labor.

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Avencia releases Walkshed Philadelphia, also named in Philadelphia 100

Avencia, the neighborhood-specific, data-crazed Callowhill-based geographic analysis and software development firm, released its Walkshed Philadelphia last week.

The online application that gives block-by-block “walkability” calculations for Philadelphia has company in the space, including Walk Score, the Seattle-based national big dog that inspired the locally-focused one. But Avencia’s latest pet project aims to do what it does best, cater to the nuance of Philadelphia.

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Google Earth application maps U.S. military deaths, 16 lost from Philadelphia

Nick Zangara was 21-years-old in 2004 when a makeshift bomb exploded near his convoy in Tikrit, 90 miles northwest of Baghdad and a universe from his home in Northeast Philadelphia.

The George Washington High School graduate is one of at least 16 people from Philadelphia who have been killed in Middle Eastern military conflicts this decade, according to a new Google Earth layer called “Map the Fallen.”

“This Memorial Day I would like to share with you a personal project of mine that uses Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan,” writes Sean Askay, the layer’s creator. ”I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each of their stories—you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit memorial Web sites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died.”

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