Impressive as Google Earth is, on two occasions I’ve shown the application to someone only to have them respond, disappointedly, “Oh, you mean this isn’t a live view of Earth?”

Neither person would have been able to tell apart their megabytes from their megahertz if pressed, so it’s understandable that they are oblivious to the technological machinations that would need to be performed before Google Earth might go “live”. We might be able to put a man on the moon, but streaming terabytes of data per second to Earth is quite another matter.

Not that people aren’t working on it. SearchEngineWatch points to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about Astrovision, a company that purports to be working towards exactly that kind of capability.

Registration required for the article, but SearchEngineWatch’s take is well worth the read. (I just don’t get their concern with privacy. Intelligence services already have this capacity. Democratizing access to such technology can only be a good thing. Who watches the watchers, etc…)

MyGuestmap makes your cute website even cuter using Google Maps. Herval Freire in Brazil manages all the back-end work for you and then serves you a map on your site where visitors can pin their location, a link and/or a message.

Here is one I just made. Feel free to play with it.

But that’s not why I’m mentioning MyGuestmap; Ogle Earth focuses on Google Earth, not Maps. (If you want a mention on Ogle Earth, please bear this in mind:-) I’m mentioning MyGuestmap because now you can also view your guests’ scribblings in Google Earth — it’s in alpha still, and not yet packaged as a dynamic network link, but this is a neat innovation, because it provides a location-aware commenting function viewable from inside Google Earth. Using Google Earth, you’ll also be able to subscribe to all your friends’ MyGuestmaps, or monitor many of your own simultaneously. Try that with a conventional browser.

Two weeks ago, I posted a layer to Google Earth Community made from Google Moon. The layer was a low-resolution proof of concept, but I remember reading somewhere that Google had resorted to the cheese close-up because higher-resolution images of the moon were not available to them.

Yesterday in a post to the above thread, Jim Volp, operations engineer at ESA for the Smart-1 lunar orbiter, pointed us in the right direction: To a series of extremely high-resolution lunar maps available from USGS. Just keep on doubling the area for some amazing pictures; then imagine them as a layer on Google Earth. Anybody willing to do the work? (My Google Earth is unforunately in a Virtual PC on my Mac here at home, and not conducive to positioning layers of any bulk.)

Perhaps Google themselves might be persuaded to replace the cheese with some new content from this trove. Best of all would be a proper Google Moon, with altitude information, served via a Google Earth-like application, though what monetizing opportunities that could possibly hold is beyond me. (I might be up for buying the content, actually. Or perhaps Google Moon could become a kind of mirrorworld sci-fi settler MMORPG!)

Gorgeous-looking vlogmap.org, a Google Maps-based worldwide repository of vloggers (video bloggers) has gone and exposed its database to Google Earth via a dynamic network link, to great effect.

This one really is impressive. Mashups like these are what turn Google Earth into a constant source of mouth-agape wonder for me. Social mapping software simply rules.

(Instructions on how to manually set up the network link are posted here, but I’ve gone ahead and followed them and saved the result as a KMZ network link for automatic download and installation right here [KMZ].)

But before you do any of this, run to Anders Clerwall’s The Random Show in Stockholm, where he’s made a Quicktime movie of the Google Earth + vlogmap mashup in action. It’s pure bliss.

Brief bigger picture thoughts: I find services like Blogwise and vlogger provide a highly intuitive means of discovering interesting and relevant content. That’s because we tend to blog locally, even if we think globally. It works for blogs, it works for vlogs, so why not podcasts? Is the iTunes interface really the best way to organize podcasters, especially those lumped into the “International” category? Wouldn’t folders in Google Earth containing dynamic network links corresponding to the top-level categories of podcasts be a better direction to start in? Wouldn’t it be lovely if by iTunes 6 we had an Earth button somewhere on the interface that mapped your current selection of podcasts onto Google Earth for browsing?