Links: Google Earth Books, Google Earth Football, TierraWiki overhaul

Live, from Napa Valley:

  • Adena Shutzberg reports from the New York State Geospatial Summit that Google Earth CTO Michael Jones previewed a feature that links locations in Google Earth to locations in Google’s scanned books. Google Earth’s timeline functionality lets you surf through the publication date of the books, and there appears to be a clever system for avoiding clutter, reports Adena.
  • Mickey Mellen, Google Earth game pioneer with GEWar and founder of Google Earth Hacks, announces a new game: Google Earth Football:

    I’m pretty sure this is the first app for Google Earth to take custom user feedback directly from within Google Earth without using the COM API or the built-in web browser. The other game we made (GEwar, a while back) relied heavily on the browser. This game runs 100% within Google Earth. If you know of other apps that do this, please let me know.

  • Mickey has also started a new blog, Digital Earth Blog. Why?

    After coming back from Where 2.0 and the Google Developer Day, I thought I’d probably have a lot to say about a variety of earth products so I started that blog. It’ll be a lot lighter on the GE stuff than you or Frank, but hopefully covering more detail about Virtual Earth, Google Maps, World Wind, etc.

  • The Times of India manages to milk the story about New York state lawmaker Michael Gianaris calling for censorhip of Google’s satellite imagery.
  • TierraWiki gets a major overhaul. Writes Tim Park:

    The major addition with this release is that we have kicked off building a digital trail database with corresponding network links into Google Earth (and Google Maps on the site). This builds on the track statistics that we had previously had by combining GPS data from the same trail to refine the internal model of the trail and provide a range of times that it has taken different trail users to complete a trail to make planning outdoor trips easier.

    This page explains how trail info is processed, which is then accessible via a KML network link covering all trails. Here is a page showing a single trail.