Following up from this morning’s remainders, you can Google KMZ files as well, clearly. There’s about 6,500 of them, estimates Google. Good to see that one of the most useful network links created thus far, David Burden’s NewsGlobe for RSS newsfeeds, is currently listed first.

Fiach Reid’s Blog: Serving Google Earth Links from a website using ASPX.

Googling “filetype:kml inurl:kml” gets you lots of KML files. (Via gregorrothfuss’s del.icio.us links)

A German Google Earth forum: “Entdecke die Erde via Satellit”

Matt Croydon on massaging “found” geolocation data for NOAA’s weather feeds into something useful for Google Earth.

Wigle Data to Google Earth: Use PHP to convert an existing database of wi-fi access points into a network link.

More innovative uses of KML in this Google Earth Community thread. “PasiH” has created a web application that provides visitor tracking via Google Earth and called it Mazurka, in honor of a Polish folk dance in triple time with a usually moderate tempo, containing a heavy accent on the third or second beat.

Ogle Earth has generously agreed to act as a Guinea Pig to test this.

Here is the KMZ network link that tracks Ogle Earth’s site visitors. Feel free to download and find yourself on the map. It’s refreshed every 10 minutes.

To roll your own, all you need to do is go to the Mazurka page and enter the URL of the site you want tracked. In return you get a network link and an HTML snippet. You put the HTML snippet into the site files you want tracked. The snippet requests an image from the Mazurka server whenever a visitor’s browser renders the HTML, which is how Mazurka knows what the visitor’s IP address is. This IP address is then converted to a real location, and that location is then provided as an entry in the KML that the network link periodically requests.

It’s a lot simpler than that description makes it sound, really. The one rough edge that I could see is that unkown IPs tend to be mapped to near Equatorial Guinea (but that could probably be solved by adding a line of code that filters out those entries). Also, I have no idea what else is being done with Ogle Earth’s visitor tracking data once Mazurka has it, but this blog has no secrets. (And no shame.)

(The tracker is valid for www.ogleearth.com URLs; I’m not sure if it tracks go.ogleearth.com hits.)

In High Earth Orbit, a post pointing to a wonderful new mashup: Freesound, free geotagged (!) ambient sounds from around the world. With a network link to Google Earth from the get-go.

Now the race is on to find a place that’s in both Freesound and this QuickTime VR database for the complete immersive experience.

All this raises an interesting angle though. We sighted people get all impressed by the spinning globe on our screen, but what’s in it for the visually impaired? Not much, at the moment, but the same was the case for the internet circa 1995. Gradually, navigation techniques for the blind were developed for conventional websites, and there is no reason why spatial locations should be any harder to convert.

On the contrary, it might be much easier. If locations on Google Earth were to one day emit distinctive sounds from distinctive directions for a direction-aware headset, with loudness indicating distance, for example, and with position labels read out, Google Earth the browser is potentially a far more intuitive environment to navigate for information gathering than the old-skool website, because spatial awareness is something that is common to everyone — no sight needed.

An intriguing idea: Robin Capper, a New Zealand CAD professional who blogs, sees a future where Google Earth becomes a common ground, so to speak, for architects and others who use computers to model buildings:

A BIM project that extended to a site, or maybe suburban layout, can now be placed in context. Anyone with a broadband net connection can have the world on their desktop today. Your project is part of that world.

He references this article in an online trade publication, but go via Robin, he has an interesting take on it.

(Acronym alert: BIM = Building Information Modeling; AEC = Architecture, Engineering & Construction, and CAD = Computer Aided Design.)

The new Google Maps-based Geobloggers site is out. My God.

Maps bleeding to the edge? Check.

Floating draggable, resizable interactive windows? Check.

Its own API for hacking? Check.

Savable Searches? Check.

Dynamic drop-down menus? Check.

Translucent status messages? Check.

(And, er, works wonderfully with Safari once you click on the + in the Search Results? Check.)

All this seems to vindicate the Google Strategy that if you build the infrastructure, they will come and build the scratch pads for you.

And Google Earth support is now well ingrained. (Feature suggestion: In Map Tools, my favorite new feature is the ability to pick a country and then a city from a list to be whisked there automatically. That’s incredibly useful. I’d love it for there also to be a “Fly to Google” button there, as this kind of augmented browsing isn’t currently available in Google Earth.)

I’m stunned.

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…)