I haven’t tried this, but Queenslander John Scott (AKA Ivanavitch on Google Earth Community) has built a Windows server application that reads live GPS data and outputs its as KML in real time, ready for Google Earth.

As long as you’re within internet range, then, you can plot your precise position in Google Earth. And that’s precisely what I was asking for when I sat on my wi-fi enabled SAS flight to New York a few weeks ago, wishing I could use Google Earth instead of the far less impressive on-board mapping system to follow along with the plane. All we need now is a photo of this in action by someone.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, I don’t suppose GPS units work inside a giant Faraday cage. Has anyone ever gotten a position inside a plane with a GPS unit, perhaps from a window seat? Or are planes going far too fast in any case? Maybe the solution then would be to have Scott’s server running on the plane’s computer, serving KML to the plane’s LAN from the cockpit’s GPS coordinates. Unfortunately, that’s beginning to sound far-fetched again.

(The software is “very beta”, and you need a GPS unit, obvs. Initial thread on the software is here. )

gmaps2kml is a simple site that does exactly what it promises: Turn your view inside Google Maps into a KML placemark ready for Google Earth.

(Recap: Another option is this KML generator. If all you want to do is switch views from Google Maps to Google Earth, I recommend MutantMaps for Firefox browsers. There is also a manual converter between the two.)

[Update 2005-08-01, 10:27 UTC: Please note a comment left by Earthhopper, who thankfully speaks Japanese, and who thus was able to understand that, in addition to the page above, there is also a bookmarklet that can be used with Google Maps to put a placemark in Google Earth. The great thing is that this works with most browsers, not just Firefox. So read the comments.]

GeoTagging Flickr is a Flickr group for discussing all things related to putting geotags onto Flickr pictures. The group also has a linklist to useful geotagging tools.

(Recap: Google Earth will show geotagged Flickr images if you subscribe to the geobloggers network link. More about this here.)

If I didn’t need sleep, I’d be spending more time on these two Google Earth holy grails:

1) Write a plugin or Greasemonkey script that automatically detects whether a web page being viewed in a browser has geoURLs of some sort in its header, and if it does, to make Google Earth fly there (in the background, if possible). [Note to self: Learn Javascript]

2) Use Brad Choate’s Key Values plugin to allow Movable Type blog posts to contain geoURL data, which are then placed in the page’s html header, but which is additionally output as a KMZ feed alongside the RSS feed, so that Google Earth users can read network-linked blogs geographically, rather than sequentially (which is the RSS way).

The idea being that geographic proximity is far more important to us social animals than we might have let on this past decade, infatuated as we were with the newness of the web URL.

(Yes, I’m posting this in the hope that somebody will beat me to it.)

The MutantMaps Firefox Toolbar lets you keep your view intact as you switch between different mapping services and mashups. And yes, it supports Google Earth. Impressive!

Steeev at Excellatronic Communications figures out a way to automate adding geotags to Flickr photos, using Greasemonkey and Google Earth. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but it looks funky.

On his voyage into the guts of Google Earth, Mark McLaren discovers that the application comes with a GPS file format converter called GPSBabel, which means it can load GPX files, the defacto GPS file standard. That will make life a lot easier for those with legacy data they’d like to put to use in Google Earth.

Mark also discovers a lot more about how both Maps and Earth get their data. Definitely worth a read.

[Update 00:07 UTC 2005-07-27: Here is a long list of GPX resources. And here is repository of GPX files.]