Some spots on Google’s Earth offer more rewarding browsing than others — the hi-res ones, visually depicted here. The images on the other side of that link show some unlikely spots for hi-resolution imagery; in Europe, the northwest Portuguese coast, Corsica and Sardinia are shown offering rewarding closeups.
Category Archives: Content
Spotting wifi
Quebecois blogger Steven Mansour wants Google Earth to show wifi hotspots, and goes on to outline a method in which local wifi activists could publish KML files pinpointing the locations.
In the meantime, gwifi is showing it is possible to scrape wifi hotspot geodata and map it onto Google Maps. But it doesn’t do locations outside the US, nor does it produce KML files for Google Earth (yet). Jiwire does have a global repository of hotspots (69 in Stockholm alone), but does not provide this data in a version that Google Maps or Google Earth can read. Soon, please. (LifeHacker is also asking nicely).
Swedish news localized
This post comes better late than never, but if you speak Swedish, frisim has a KML network link for Google Earth that links local Swedish news to their respective locations.
D-ORT
German-speaking Google Earth users can now have 20,000 place names in Germany, Switzerland and Austria linked to their respective German-speaking Wikipedia.
Moroccan rally driving
A French blogger had his GPS data of an off-road trip through Morocco lying around. Now it’s been revived and uploaded as KML for Google Earth.
[And now I’m off to a wedding where there is no broadband, nor cell phones. Back in 3 days.]
Google Maps Mania
Google Maps Mania: “An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, ideas and tools being influenced by Google Maps.”
Real-time tracking of busses
Over on the Keyhole Community bulletin board (Keyhole is what Google Earth was called before Google bought it and made it free), somebody has converted GPS data of live locations of public transport buses in Boulder, Colorado, and turned them into a KML file that updates in real time. Great proof of concept.