1.Lawrence, Kansas is the center of the Earth. Or at least Google Earth. The town’s own paper has an absolutely charming article about how Lawrence is the town directly below your feet when you first fire up Google Earth.

2. A Canadian geography teacher lets Google Earth loose among his students and describes what happens.

3. A blog post hosted by the Belgian paper De Standaard reports (in Dutch) that in Greece, the military is not at all happy with the high resolution imagery of Athens that is publicly available in Google Earth. Apparently, they are upset that satellite imagery of Turkey is of lower resolution than that of Greece. I’m sure this problem could easily be fixed:-)

4. Google Earth and Maps are about to get their very own book, Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth, written by Martin Brown. (Via Let’s push things forward)

5. A Google Earth Community post reports that there is a location error for two locations in Russia. (I too have found that searching for Islamabad, Pakistan and Stockholm, Sweden leads to locations that are in-country, but not accurate at all.) Another user mentions that there is a data error reporting form for this sort of thing, with instructions.

6. Australian GIS company ER Mapper publishes layers of Landsat imagery of Australia from various years as a free KML network link, part of a demo of its web serving abilities.

7. Google Earth Hacks posts a network link that displays 38,000 geographically marked-up Wikipedia entries, the best 80 at a time in your current field of view. Pretty awesome way to surf and learn.

8. Wow, is the Times of India a one-note whining machine or what? And the paper has a tenuous relationship with the facts, especially if these get in the way of jingoistic pursuits (noted: Google Earth was launched June 28, 2005, not “almost 18 months ago”).