Zorgloob, a French Google blog, has now also started a forum and sightseeing section, with links to both Google Maps and Google Earth, and the ability to leave comments.

Ogle Earth now has an Atom 1.0 feed, if you’re so inclined, in addition to the usual suspects.

No, nothing to do with tagging. Instead, Tageo is another directory of places on Earth, similar to Global Gazetteer and Earth Search, previously covered on this blog.

Special features of Tageo: It shows you the coordinates both with decimals and with minutes and seconds. Also, the search seems to have some error tolerance for alternate spellings. (Via Charles Joubert)

Item: Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds in Linux Journal. (Via Jeff Barr’s Blog)

Item: Earth and Moon Viewer (Via We Saw a Chicken)

Item: Sweden’s Aftonbladet newspaper takes the Google-Earth-is-a-terrorist’s-best-friend meme and runs with it. Replete with the “Americans get to censor what they want” lament. This is getting so tedious. (Via Suburbia)

Bike Portland has details of plans by Portland’s Metro transportation planning agency to integrate with Google Earth more deeply than anything else I have seen to date.

Metro’s got all of Portland’s bike paths available for download as KML, but now they’d also like to provide a trip planner for bikes using these paths, just like the trip planner that already exists for cars on roads. This sounds like it would take some work on Google’s end, and it doesn’t seem to be a done deal just yet, but Metro is asking for feedback:

Note: the trip planner is not yet available. Metro is exploring the use of this technology. Tell us what you think.

I wonder if there is a core trip-planning technology Google has that can then be adapted to arbitrary path topologies, or do trip planners for roads come riddled with exceptions to avoid nonsense results? If it’s the former case, then the work of providing a trip planner for bikes might involve little more than properly meshing a path network to a generic trip-planning API, and if that is the case, then perhaps soon anyone will be able to create their own trip planner services. But now we’re purely speculating.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. I wonder, would such a trip planner be sophisticated enough that it can use Google Earth’s altitude data to calculate gradients, and then offer cyclists is San Francisco the least upwardly steep route among its options?

Google Earth Hacks announces GEHwar, the first game that uses Google Earth as its playing field. It’s Risk-like, it fosters geography skills, and it boasts some very innovative use of the network link. You can read all about it on their forum, and the instructions are here. In its first iteration, there is room for 25 players. Writes Google Earth Hacks’ Mickey:

The part that took the longest was getting the network link to tell me WHO was looking at a certain location. Once I got that figured out, I’ve made it where parts of the game can be played inside of Google Earth through one network link, while the ongoing results of the game are pushed to Google Earth using a second network link.

How he got a server to know to whom specifically it was sending KML to is still an open question. We’ll have to ask him.

Connotea is a souped-up social bookmarking service, much like de.icio.us but with extra harvesting of metadata from articles in academic publications.

And now they’ve added support for geotags (using exactly the same markup as with del.icio.us and flickr), linking the locations directly to Google Earth.

You can read all about it on their blog. The upshot is that all the articles in a particular collection that have been geotagged now have their geodata available as a KML file downloadable via the “Geo Data” link.

This feature is new and experimental, and they’re asking for feedback, so do try it out.

I’ve noticed that the geotagging data is not provided as a ready-made network link pointing to a dynamically generated KML file, but instead as just a dynamically generated KML file, which creates static placemarks when opened in Google Earth. Instead, you might want to manually add a network link yourself in Google Earth, using the URL provided by the geodata button as the source. The next step would be for Connotea to do this work for us by giving us a network link to download, thus effectively providing regularly updated geofeeds by author or by topic. This way we could automatically keep an eye on all locations tagged for the avian flu in Google Earth, foe example, or all locations tagged by a particular author.

Since so much science is location-specific (think dinosaur finds, discoveries of new species, earthquake research, disease outbreaks, field research locations) this innovation is going to do wonders for contextualizing discoveries.

Finally, Connotea is also compiling a list of geotagged universities, and is asking for help contributing. (I’ve already done all the Swedish ones, so I’ll contribute those soon:-) (Via Catalogablog)