- Extra-solar fest: From the most minimalist launch page imaginable, data miner Sagi Shporer presents a KML file referencing all the extra-solar planets listed in Wikipedia. Some stars get multiple mentions — those have multiple planets. All this is timely information on the day that the discovery of a star with five planets is announced. (Sphorer’s layer has the star in question, 55 Cancri, tagged with 4 planets, so you can find it by doing a quick search across your KML content once it’s loaded.)
- Multi-user Google Earth goes OpenSocial: The boys (and girls?) at Unype are a fast bunch. First they developed a Skype-based multi-user Google Earth network link. Then came the plugin for Facebook. And now, days after Google comes out with the OpenSocial API, there’s a version for Orkut that uses the APIs. I’m pretty sure this also means that porting Facebook apps to OpenSocial is going to be relatively straightforward.
- Neogeo job: James Fee is looking for a good neogeographer out West to employ.
- US Defense Appropriations: A cool layer: Where US Defense Appropriations Earmarks are going to (literally:-).
- World (geo)Bank: Foreign Policy links to MDG Monitor in Google Earth, but also finds an very well done Google Maps implementation by the World Bank of its data bank. (Now if only they’d turn this into a KML layer as well…)
- Is that galaxy hot or not?: Not really Google Earth-related, but I’ve been having fun with Galaxy Zoo: It an astronomical mechanical turk, where you get to advance science by classifying galaxies far far away based on their appearance — it’s something we humans are still better at than computers… at the moment.