By definition, you have to be in the same place as a band be able to hear them play live in concert, which is why it is crucial to know A) where you are and B) where the bands you like will be.

You usually know A. Why not let a web service do the rest? Something called Foafing-the-music sets out to do just that. There is a demo here, and all of it is exportable to Google Earth.

Here is a site that seems to have taken off in Scandinavia, so to speak: Flightlog.org lets people upload and share their GPS enabled paragliding flights. Why share? I asked myself that too, until I realized that the original impetus of the site was (and is) to act as a clearing house for paragliding races.

What’s new, and the reason I mention it here, is that all the flights in its database can now be viewed in Google Earth. For example here is a flight near Stockholm that ended up ditching in the sea.

Get yer new network links right here.

Directions Magazine has a great big-picture article, Spatial Information Management (SIM) – Then, Now, Next, which provides a potted history of GIS that puts the current technological rapids in context. Among the gems:

First, information technology always evolves toward the way that people think and act. Location is a fundamental part of the way we think and act.

I too have wondered why it took so long for web information to finally start reorganizing itself along geographic lines. I suspect the URL, and the location-free dimension it inhabits, is soon going to be thoroughly linked to coordinate pairs, not least by Google Earth/Maps and the swarm of social mapping applications that it is breeding.

I learned a lot from this article.

Those of us who like to throw themselves out of airplanes will be glad to know that skydiving logbook programme Paralog now supports Google Earth.

Google comes in handy for victims:

Taking inspiration from the online volunteers, Google, NASA and Carnegie Mellon University had by Saturday night made the effort more formal, incorporating nearly 4,000 posthurricane images into the Google Earth database (at www.earth.google.com) for public use.

“It was 100 percent a reaction to what they were doing,” John Hanke, a general manager who is in charge of the Google Earth service, said on Sunday. “They knew about the NOAA data before Google did.”

[Update 09:37 UCT: The link to the story in the NYT.]

Google Earth’s home page now has 2 major KMZ updates for downloading: One links to a collection of 3228 post-Hurricane Katrina images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) created “through some serious efforts by NASA, Carnegie Mellon University, and Google.” The other is a collection of all the overlays and placemarks submitted to Google Earth Community over the past 8 days related to Katrina.

This whole is an impressive example of collaboration and self-organization. Thanks to everyone involved.

What’s interesting from a social software perspective is that it is still Google Maps that provides the best means for dynamically updated user-contributed data, however. Witness the Katrina Information Map (with more possibly showing up on Google Maps Mania) that lets visitors add placemarks onto a map of Louisiana with messages or information. Google Earth’s “API” is still far too limited to let that quality and ease of interaction happen. Until it does, the application remains a one-way street when it comes to live updated data — easy to consume, but hard to contribute. This is probably the biggest obstacle left to Google Earth’s becoming the next generation browser.

[Update 09:21 UTC: One further thought: It also appears to be a lot easier to add an ad hoc “emergency” layer to Google Maps than it is to Google Earth. A feature request for Google Earth, then: A permanent “Emergency” or “Special” item in the the Layers directory that can be automatically populated with this kind of data, which we currently download manually.]