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?

Google Globe‘s Globe Assistant dynamic network link has just gotten some added functionality. If you already have it installed you will notice that the Assistant now checks a BBC newsfeed for stories inside the bounding box of your field of vision and then displays those, in addition to the location entries submitted by users at the site.

The Globe Assistant actually does some pretty nifty stuff via that bounding box “API”: If you fly out too far, it will tell you you need to zoom in before it can deliver content. It will also tell you if no news is available in your field of view. In other words, the network link delivers KML in response to your location that is rather more varied than what I’ve seen until now.

At the same time, however, the user submitted content does not seem to be vetted for quality or duplicates, and is business friendly, welcoming company plugs rather than considering them to be spam. At first sight this might make the value of the Globe Assistant’s content a little dubious, but then you realise that the Assistant is actually a demo for a product, showcased at GlobeAssistant.com: Globe Assistant is being marketed to travel agents, real estate companies and news organizations as a means of delivering private or specialized content to potential customers and readers. They’d buy their own Globe Assistant that links to their own data (including RSS feeds), and send that to people they want to reach. (I think that’s the plan.)

If the interactivity is as robust as it seems, this could prove a nice little turnkey solution for realtors, and GoogleGlobe’s Erwin Nikkels may well become the first person to actually make any money off the Google Earth application:-)

(Though, if I may be so bold, in that case the site may want to consider differentiating itself a little more from the Google look. The first time I visited I thought it was a Google site, until I read the small print a few days later.)

Previously, when enthusiasts and hobbyists had an urgent need to communicate locations on a map, they had to make do with ad hoc solutions. Because Google Earth just looks so good, and the data format is so powerful, these locations are now beginning to migrate into KML. Case in point: This blog post on velodrome locations in the US, and how the author moved his database into Google Earth.

BestOfWorldMaps — yet another sightseeing site with support for Google Earth (but also for NASA World Wind).

First, there was the BBC as KML.

Then, David Burden made his code more generic, so that virtually any RSS news feed with a half-way decent dateline can populate a KMZ file.

Now, Lon has used David’s code to post a KMZ file containing all of the Washington Post’s feeds.

Who’s next? Perhaps an aggregator like Google could create a composite feed that uses David’s trick to show the 50 most important stories visible within the bounding box of the field of view, refreshed when the view stops moving.

This would go a long way towards giving local news a global reach, and hence relevance. Proximity to news would become far more important, boosting smaller local providers.