Google Earth: You say you want a Revolution?

We have lots of amazing tools available to us.  Megabits of bandwidth, Gigabytes of hard disk, Gigahertz of computing power... But still in general I find the "wow" experiences are few and far between.

But Google Earth blows me away.

Truly it is a god's eye view.

I'm not a person who has a good sense of relative locations and distances, it is so powerful to be able to fly around in Google Earth and discover... so that's how far away my work is from where I live?

Even more powerful, Google built in a way to share placemarks in the same way you can share bookmarks.  Here's a placemark for CISTI Ottawa.

Download NRC-CISTI-Ottawa.kmz

(UPDATE 2005-09-18: It seems the revolution is not quite ready for primetime.  Until TypePad configures their servers for .kmz files, the above file will not download automatically.  You can download it in Firefox by right-clicking and selecting Save Link.  In Internet Explorer it thinks it is a .zip file.  Thanks to the commenter Frank Taylor for pointing this out.)

You can also submit placemarks to the community BBS, and they will make their way into the "Keyhole Community BBS" layer within Google Earth.

(To make a placemark, put your cursor over the desired location and hit CTRL-N.  Doesn't have to be exact, you can always move it around to your satisfaction.  Once created, you can right-click to save it as a .kmz file, or send it by email, or post it to the BBS.)

Google Earth has also completely changed the way I plan a trip.  Now I can truly see and somewhat understand where I am going, and how different locations there relate to one another.  I can find my hotel, I can locate the conference venues, I can imagine where I might want to walk... it's amazing.

Google Earth continues to add data.  Yesterday they announced a partnership with National Geographic.

Have you ever dreamed of Africa while reading National Geographic? The exotic photographs and thoughtful articles take you there with a magical sense of place. Today we embraced that magic by releasing Google Earth data layers that index National Geographic stories, images, journals, and even a live webcam in Africa.

from Google Blog: The illuminated continent.

Comments

[Frank Taylor]

You need to have your web server support the mime-type for Google Earth's KMZ files for people to download your link from your web site. Here's the instructions from Google:

"You can correct any MIME type errors by setting the httpd.conf file to:

Application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml kml
Application/vnd.google-earth.kmz kmz
"

Note: If you can't get this done, let me know and I'll host your file on my Google Earth Blog at http://www.googleearthblog.com/