New layers: US hiking, New Zealand tourism, skiing

Besides the Darfur layers, several other new layers made it into Google Earth this morning.

  • New Zealand is the first country whose tourism department has managed to get a prime spot in Google Earth, with placemarks of popular destinations that lead to the relevant websites. Now why didn’t Sweden think of that?:-)
  • The Trimble Outdoors Trips layer adds GPS tracks and imagery from user-contributed hiking trips in the US. Nice feature: You can send a trip you like directly to your web-enabled phone. If your phone is GPS-enabled, you can send it the track data instead.
  • There is a new layer called “Skiing” that shows ski resorts and ski lifts. Elsewhere, there is a new layer for “mountain railways”. All this comes together beautifully in — where else — Switzerland, where the Matterhorn is now surrounded by lots of new geospatial data:

zermatt.jpg