I’ve just had way too much fun playing with KML Writer, a poor man’s Google Earth authoring tool. Just draw a polygon by clicking away in the Google Maps interface, add the amount of extrusion in meters, and export the result as a KML file that opens right away in Google Earth. You can even combine different polygons into one KML file. And it’s free.

One obvious use is making instant skyscrapers that really give free rein to your inner Trump. Here is my vision for Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, New York, circa 2016: Ogle Earth Towers (KML), a 300-meter high medium-income housing project to alleviate the housing shortage there. There’s always Central Park for those who need parks, though imagine the size of the things you could build in Central Park!

KML Writer is by Simple Spatial Solutions, a Canadian outfit.

Late last year Mologogo began offering the ability to let you use your GPS/Java phone to share your position with friends, either to their Java phone or to a Google Map. Besides being free, it apparently also just works, as this Make: review testified to.

And now they’ve gone Google Earth. First, it was a PHP script that you could run on your own server, which you could then use to power a network link. Not everybody has access to a server, so it’s good news that you can now get any public user’s 100 latest points as a KML file, via this page.

Note, however, that what you get returned is a file that opens as a static file in Google Earth. If you want to get the URL for the dynamically created file to wrap inside a network link, hack the sample link provided ÇƒÓ basically, it’s

http://mologogo.ilovemygeek.com/molokml.php?user=gravitymonkey

where gravitymonkey is a public user’s name, which you can replace at will. It seems to work well, though the resulting KML is a set of waypoints, not a path; a path would definitely help in determining the waypoints’ sequence.

Rob Roy, previously of FlickrFly and UKAutumnColour fame, has now come up with GETrackr, a dead simple way of generating geotags and views for Flickr and other geotag-savvy web apps.

At the moment, GETrackr is an adjunct of sorts to Mark Zeman’s FlickrMap geotagger — able to add the view tags (which FlickrMap can’t) but not fully integrated with the browser (which FlickrMap is). Rob writes that GETrackr’s functionality will soon be added to FlickrMap, but that GETrackr is a good stop-gap solution. Stop gap or no, this is one of the simplest and most intuitive geotaggers I’ve seen, so that alone might be enough for many. (Ogle Earth’s review of FlickrMap.)

(The installation instructions tell you to use the built-in browser, which might flummox Mac users. My Mac was able to use GETrackr without problems in FireFox externally, though.)

Brian Timoney of Timoney Group might think he is just engaging in some clever viral marketing when he releases demos of how he can help companies portray data in Google Earth, but this time he may just have come up with the best argument yet to justify installing Google Earth at the office, should your IT department have nixed the idea until now: You need it for financial analysis.

We’ve seen Google Earth used for geography, science, to illustrate historical events and as a social tool. Now it’s also an economic tool, as this network link of Latin American trade patterns makes clear. And there is some clever use of hovering involved. I love it.

[Update 21:51 UTC: Cory Eicher at Eicher-GIS.com deserves equal credit with Brian Timoney for this work.]

The Guardian’s John Lanchester, doesn’t get Google Earth. In a review of Google’s offerings, he writes:

Google Earth isn’t particularly useful, but it is brutally cool: you begin with a satellite view and gradually descend to earth, homing in with a level of detail that can give you a view of your own house (also, it turns out, of secret military installations).

Lanchester obviously uses Google Earth only for the eyecandy. But he should at least have remembered these two particular cases were Google Earth was particularly useful in just the past six months: Hurricane Katrina and the Pakistan Quake. And don’t get me started on the versatility of the network link and the boon this program is for geographic literacy in schools. It’s Lanchester who isn’t being particularly useful to his readers in this instance.

Digitally distributed environments does it again. I’m speechless.

This is precious, if geeky: Developers at Eyebeam have come up with a way of capturing 3D objects from mainstream 3D Windows applications (like Half Life and World of Warcraft) and then reusing these data objects, either in Google Earth, 3D printers, or in 3D manipulation applications like Maya. The software package that does this is called OGLE (OpenGL Extractor) and the website highlighting the technology likens the process to making a 3D screen grab.

Visit the site and you’ll find a Second Life avatar transposed onto Google Earth’s Manhattan San Francisco(?), where it is playing Godzilla.

It can only be a matter of weeks (?) before somebody ports King Kong’s likeness to Google Earth’s Empire State Building as a KML file. Right?

(Oh, and somebody was wondering if there is a way of capturing objects from Google Earth’s own 3D buildings layer. The answer to that turns out to be Yes.)

(Via Make via Virtually Yours)