This weekend’s trip through the archives to trawl up the gems for the expanded right column (now that it’s easy to do) brought to light a couple of sites that have improved since the last visit:

• German site Geokoordinaten für Google Earth is a directory service for finding and mapping places to Google Earth, but with a unique twist: Choose a country and then enter some search text. This web app will return a KMZ for Google Earth with all the placenames starting with that text. For Example, search for “ber” in Germany and you will get 1185 places returned for opening Google Earth, just one of them Berlin. Each placemark has a link to Wikipedia, whether or not the article exists. Somewhat useless, but lots of fun.
• FBOweb.com made quite an impact when they began offering live flight tracking of commerical airlines in Google Earth. They have a pay service, but now they have also expanded their free offerings to include live plots for inbound traffic to seven US airports. Most impressive to me are some cool overlays they’ve added: A massive 3D layer showing Special Use Airspace around US airports, and an excellent network link to detailed sectional maps for pilots covering the entire US.

Eyecandy?

A year ago I never thought I’d be staring at something like this on my desktop for free. Long live the march of technology.

Do check out the lists on the right, at your convenience. If you think I’ve missed something obvious or know of something new to add (or see a mistake) email me or leave a comment.