RoboGEO really has quite a few tricks up its sleeve when it comes to georeferencing photographs. It aready provides Flickr users with Flickr2Map, a free service that links geotagged Flickr images to their location in Google Earth, Maps, and other apps.

RoboGEO also makes a standalone PC application that lets you marry GPS data with pictures in many different ways — version 3.1, out today, intergrates with Flickr and can handle Google Maps’ new API. (It already does KML, obviously.)

GPS Visualizer, the web app that lets you convert GPS data files to Google Earth KML while adding lots of customization, just got better. Writes Adam Schneider:

GPS Visualizer can now draw Google Earth tracks that are colorized by altitude, speed, etc. Unfortunately, GE only lets you assign one color to each placemark, so I have to do it by breaking the track into hundreds of individual placemarks collected in a folder — but it’s actually not too bad. (In Google Maps, doing the same thing is terrible.)

That should produce some stunning results for anyone who hang glides, hikes, or drives. You can even colorize according to your heart rate (!).

Here’s another blogger who’s been toying with the idea of using Google Earth as a dynamic historical atlas of sorts. Anthony’s been playing with a MySQL database and some PHP scripts to experiment with making a tour of the Roman empire as a network link which you play. It’s more of a proof of concept, but that’s where all great ideas start.

Austria’s Christian Spanring has created an XSLT stylesheet that converts KML to GML. Matt Perry runs with it and creates a command-line script that converts KML to ESRI shapefiles. What’s going on? Now that all the good applications allow exporting to KML, there are all these KML files lying around that people would like to import into their favorite apps. Further evidence of KML as the de facto standard.

If you use Google Earth, chances are you also use Google Desktop. In which case, youll be glad to know a new plugin, aptly called Google Earth plugin, lets you “use Google Desktop’s search to find placemark names and descriptions” inside your Google Earth files on your computer. Lots more pluins here. (Via)

The official Google Earth Community bulletin board is a great resource… except that it lacks RSS feeds. So my feature request for the next site upgrade is an easy way of staying updated on happenings there from within my RSS newsreader. The software that runs the BBS, UBB.threads, supports a third-party plug-in called rssFeeder, so it’s doable.

In the meantime, I’ve gone ahead and made a feed for the Keyhole News thread using FeedFire. You can get the RSS from this page. This is the place where new data announcements tend to be made, so it’s worth keeping an eye on it.

Hadn’t seen this one before, though it seems to have been around for a while: Convert KML to GPX files.