Recently Alaska's Mount Redoubt made the news with a spectacular eruption. According to Wikipedia:

Mount Redoubt, or Redoubt Volcano, is an active and currently erupting stratovolcano in the largely volcanic Aleutian Range of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is located in the Chigmit Mountains (a subrange of the Aleutians), west of Cook Inlet, in the Kenai Peninsula Borough about 180 km (110 miles) southwest of Anchorage.

We thought we'd take a closer look at the volcano, and indeed we showcased a bit of Mount Redobut during the recent DevSummit plenary using the soon-to-be-beta ArcGIS Explorer 900. You'll see it displayed in 900's presentation mode at the end of a post we published about the plenary demo. But 900 isn't released yet, so we thought we'd take another look at it using the current 500 version of ArcGIS Explorer.

First, we needed to locate Mount Redobut. To do that we used the GeoNames Search task which you can add to ArcGIS Explorer (if you've not done so already) from the Tasks tab on the Explorer Resource Center. Click the description of the task and you'll learn that:

Searches the GeoNames (geonames.org) geographical database. It returns geo-referenced candidates from you can create results or simply navigate to. The database contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.5 million unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million alternate names.

This task is ideal for finding place names such as mountain peaks, valleys, and other placenames you might see on topo maps. So we entered Mount Redoubt and found... well... not quite what we were looking for. We found Mount Redoubt in Washington. We then typed Redoubt Volcano and located it. We chose Create Result to add it to our map.

Turning on the topographic map layer we figured out why - the placename on the topo is indeed Redoubt Volcano, so that's the way it's stored in the GeoNames database. Here's the location on the topo map, and we've clicked to open its popup window. The information in the popup was automatically created when we used the task.

We were cruising around on the Web and found this nifty flash animation on the MSNBC site.

Viewing the source for the page we were able to figure out the flash animation source. We edited the popup properties to add the flash animation to our popup window, and here's what it looked like. The neat part is that we could use the back and next arrows within the animation to move from one animation frame to another.

And here's the HTML we typed into the popup window properties to display the animation.

<object width="550" height="400">
<param name="movie" value="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/Interactives/Technology_Science/Science/volcano_dw.swf">
<embed src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/Interactives/Technology_Science/Science/volcano_dw.swf" width="550" height="400">
</embed></object>

While we don't advocate "stealing" content from anyone's Web site (we just borrowed this), you can experiment with lots of things in popup windows that you can discover on the Web. You might need a little HTML know-how, but it's super simple to add some compelling content to your popups.