Luca Mori, an Italian systems analyst who blogs, used Google Earth Maps to rummage around his village of Sorbolo, near Parma (near Bologna). He thought he saw “anomalies.” For the duration of August he measured them, explored them, asked around, and eventually called up professional archeologists.

As they do in Italy, the archeologists had a look, only to find a previously undiscovered Roman villa! Luca has now made it to Italian television news, he writes.

All this is in Italian, but he has numerous posts over the past month detailing his search, including one with a map detailing the “anomalies”.

Bravo.

(Via Intempestiva, who first saw it on TV.)

[Update 15.44 UTC: Being in a bit of a rush earlier, I forgot to add the big picture: This is what you get when you twin deep local knowledge with democratized geographic tools. Anybody else flying over that region would have assumed there was a known local explanation for the anomaly, but it took Luca to know there wasn’t.]

For the German speakers amongst us, TerraGoo is a new blog in Google Earth orbit, covering mapping technologies and marketing from the perspective of local regional governments in Germany.

There is one continent that Google Earth is not at all good for: Antarctica. My first attempt at adding an overlay was for the South Pole, and I quickly learned that the poles are the only places on Google’s Earth where overlays are pointless, due to a quirk of the projection method used.

For Antarctica-related exploring, then, best to use the USGS’s Atlas of Antarctic Research. It has a wealth of layers that can be turned on simultaneously, including some quite precise satellite imagery. It’s not as pretty as Google Earth, but it is useful at these latitudes. (Via T√©rk√©pes Egoblog)

There’s another blog obsessed with all things Google Earth: Google Earth Blog, written by Frank Taylor. Amazingly, it’s been flying under my radar for nearly a month (perhaps because it isn’t pinging Technorati et al?)

The more Google Earth blogs the merrier — be sure to add it to your bookmarks if you want the most complete coverage possible of Google Earth.

GIS (and .NET) pro Brian Flood weighs in with assessment of Google Earth as an Enterprise GIS client.

Brian is most enthusiastic about the network link:

This one feature opens the door to an enormous amount of real time customization and will probably push GE as the de facto standard for 3D visualization over the internet.

He also points to some limitations the free client has vs. the pro version when it comes to streaming vectors from servers. Finally, he seems to have built a pretty robust KML and WMS server for Google Earth, which is promising, considering that he blogs at a company that specializes in GIS solutions for municipalities.

Sydneysider Andrew Hallam posts a long and detailed evaluation of Google Earth on his Digital Earth Weblog. He approaches the application from the perspective of a GIS professional contemplating using it for his work. It’ a fascinating and nuanced read, and amounts to some great free feedback/feature requests that Google would be remiss in ignoring.

Andrew is impressed by the network link, however. I wonder why there wasn’t such a thing before in GIS land (is there?) The idea of the network link is great, but it is “just” an XML feed applied to a spatial coordinate system. Wasn’t there ever any need for that before? How did (do) GIS pros deliver oft-updated and even dynamically generated data to a wide set of subscribers?

La Tribune de Genîve picks up a glowing AFP review about Google Earth.

In general, European papers seem to be giving Google Earth strong mainstream coverage. In the US, most reviews have been restricted to the tech pages. In Germany, France, Sweden and the Netherlands, Google Earth has been written up in the culture- or general news sections. (You’ll get no insinuations from me regarding comparative geographic awareness and interest from populations on either side of the Atlantic — unless you consider this aside an insinuation:-)