- Earth Day for Google means a collaboration with Scholastic to set up lesson plans that use Google Earth, and also a contest for American 6-8th graders to create the best Google Earth file illustrating an environmental story. 30,000 teachers are getting a project poster, 100,000 more are being emailed. This is going to be huge:-)
- The Mac version of Google Earth is now at a new build, 3.1.0621.0 (beta), dated April 16. (The last version, 3.1.0617 (beta), was dated February 7.) I can’t see any difference, and the release notes are exactly the same, so I suspect it fixes some minor bugs. No, this version is not a universal binary.
- Time to start reading up on NASA World Wind “add-ons”. Here is a blog that tracks new ones, aptly called World Wind Add-ons. And here is a full list, on World Wind Central, a wonderful wiki.
- Golf Smarter, a free podcast about golf, now has its own companion network link that points to the golf courses that are covered in the show. Seeing this is what got me thinking about integrating podcasts with KML more closely, which led to the previous post.
- Dave Pentecost’s The Daily Glyph blog has a knack for turning new maps of ancient Central American civilizations into Google Earth overlays. Piedras Negras, Usumacinta River valley, more.
- Frank Taylor is right: An unheralded but totally awesome improvement to Google Earth in the last data update is the better place names, and how they are linked to Google searches in the pop-up. The image search is a definite time saver. And time waster.
In Japan, Sakura Mapping celebrates Earth day by encouraging people to send in snaps of the cherry blossoms in bloom via their mobile phone, and then mapping them live to Google Earth and Maps. (Via Seer)