Integrating online collaborative spreadsheets over on EditGrid with Google Earth (and much else besides) continues to get quite a few people excited. Digital Geography, for example, latches on immediately to the educational opportunities this this combo affords.

Meanhwhile, EditGrid’s developers have released add-ons, including Grid2Map, which converts spreadsheets with postal addresses to Google Maps via a simple wizard.

But the most interesting development is the collaboration between Valery Hronusov and EditGrid’s Alan Tam, here on the EditGrid user forum. Alan’s point is this:

Thanks for all your brillant effort trying to use Deep Permalink to generate KML files. We in EditGrid, however, think that this solution, although works, is a sub-optimal way to let user manage their data.

In Beta 10, we have released a feature allowing exporting the whole spreadsheet into an XML file. This XML file can be optionally passed through an XSL Transformation to form another XML or text file.

That really amazing, especially as Alan comes up with an example for Valery’s data:

• Here is Valery’s spreadsheet.
• Here it is as XML.
• Here is the XSL that transforms that to KML.
• Here is the resultant KML file.
• And here it is in Google Maps.

Just like magic.

[Update 2006-08-24 00:11 UCT: Forgot the punchline: Because the XML is updated automatically as you change the spreadsheet, so is the KML. It’s therefore worthwhile to subscribe to the KML via a network link, to keep it dynamic.]