Until this morning I had never heard of the XAlps, “the ultimate paragliding race,” where contestants paraglide 800km across the Alps, east to west, without mechanized help. The race started today, August 1, in Austria. You compete by climbing to the tops of mountains with your equipment and then jumping off, gliding as far west as possible, climbing up the next one, jumping off, and repeating this all the way into Monaco.

I found all this out via Geared Up blog, which also pointed out that the 17 contestants this year are wearing GPS trackers, whose data get turned into Google Earth KML files, available for download.

Aha! The future of sport, I thought, only to find the reality akin to making it to Lake Geneva and then drowning: The KMZ files are very hard to find, are offered as static downloads, and even then only on a per-contestant basis. That’s so close, so why not go the last mile?

Luckily, the individual KML files automatically get published to the same URL and are regularly replaced. This made constructing dynamic network links out of the 17 files and collecting them into one downloadable, annotated KMZ relatively straightforward.

Here it is [KMZ].

I’ve set them to update every hour. The gliding paths they produce are wonderful, punctuated by climbs up the next hill. It’s truly the best way to see this race, and every future endurance race. (I’m rooting for Team 9.)

GoogleTouring adds a new twist to the Google Earth sightseeing concept, collecting related points of interest into a downloadable playable tour, with annotations. All we need now is to figure out a way to add sound:-) (Thanks Manuel!)

The more geotagged pictures the merrier, which is why it’s a good thing that GEOsnapper gets its own dynamic network link to put next to the one for Flickr in Google Earth.

There are fewer GEOSnapper pictures than geotagged Flickr ones, it looks like, but GEOSnapper pictures certainly look more considered — i.e., fewer holiday snaps and more postcard-like panoramas, in the main.

YOu can get the network link on Google Earth Hacks.

Productivity destroying website GoogleEarthing adds sliding puzzles to the images made with Google Earth that people are invited to hunt down.

Google Earth Hacks, a great repository of placemarks, layers and 3D models, gets a host of new features: User file ratings, top submitters, categorization by country or US state, advanced search and more.

They’re also on the look-out for new feature requests. Here is one: How about linking the images associated with file downloads of placemarks to their respective spot in Google Maps, so we can preview the placemark if we’re not near a Google Earth. If Google Maps-oriented sites can re-orient themselves to provide KML, Google Earth-oriented sites could easily do the same and offer linkage to Google Maps.

Exhaustive latitude, longitude and altitude information for all the Earth’s cities and towns, sorted by country and alphabetically.

You can drill down to an individual page for each place to find a topographic map, nearby cities, towns and airports, and recent temperature, cloud cover and precipitation.

It links to a Google search, not Google Maps or Earth (yet), but even so is a valuable resource.

The New Zealand Herald reports on how a Google Earth Community thread helped uncover the identity of a large spiral discovered on New Zealand farmland using Google Earth.

The spiral turns out to be a work of art by Virginia King, and it is rather fetching:

I’m adding it and future placemarks of interest to this blog to Ogle Earth’s Tagzania feed, which you can add as a dynamic network link to Google Earth here.