[Update 21:35 UTC: The author of this fine oeuvre has been identified. It is Chris McKeever.]

Traceroutes are lists of IP addresses. IP addresses have physical locations. Locations have coordinates. Ergo you can map traceroutes. What better place to do this than in Google Earth, dynamically? It’s a clever idea. Even cleverer is that whoever thought of it actually went and implemented it.

Here it is. It works exactly as advertised. And it is a great proof of concept that dynamically generated KML network links are immensely versatile.

Network links also let you “Fly to view on refresh,” (if you edit them) and can be made to refresh every few seconds. This means you could give someone a network link that you control, and thus give people guided tours remotely. Or perhaps soon we might be able to browse the world in unison, remotely, by having one browser’s recorded position constitute a dynamic network link for another.

Or somebody could write a plugin/servlet that scrapes the geodata from the currently displayed website on an HTML browser window and feeds it to Google Earth as a network link, so that Google Earth always shows you the physical location associated with the website you’re surfing to. Wow, we’re not even a month into Google Earth, and already one utopian browsing vision seems within reach.