One of the most visually stunning websites about Sweden is Virtual Sweden, which contains a wealth of 360-degree QuickTime VR images, and not just of Sweden.

The most recent images have a link to the actual location in Google Earth, so you can now fly to the precise location as you immerse yourself in a Swedish panorama.

One of the earliest additions of content to Google Earth involved Berkeley University’s global QTVR library, back in July 2005. The KML file is still available (KMZ) , and it still provides one of the most immersive experiences available using Google Earth. Here is the original blog post.

Get there via The Heaviest of Boots.

The Oz Report, a website fanatically dedicated to all things hang gliding and paragliding, has been implementing Google Earth functionality in some very interesting ways.

First, the site maintains an exhaustive library of global hang gliding sites, viewable both in Maps and as a network link (KMZ). Most locations have a link to information about the site.

Second, the Sportavia International Open hang gliding competition is currently underway in Australia, and each day, The Oz Report adds the flight paths of competitors to this network link (KMZ). While we’ve seen Google Earth used for something similar before (the XAlps), the paths drawn by The Oz Report in Google Earth are a big improvement in terms of visualization, and very pretty to boot. (You can even fly along the paths of individual hang gliders. Instructions are here.)

So much news, so little time. Here we go…

Sell your KML scripting skills to the entertainment industry: “A major film studio” wants to use Google Earth to promote a movie, and they need your help.

Digitally Distributed Environments decides to use several of Microsoft’s “bird’s eye views” in Live Local to generate a real 3D map of a location. The result is a-m-a-z-i-n-g (check out the QT movie). If I am not mistaken, this is akin to the SilverEye technology that Geotango possesses and which Microsoft bought that company for.

How often is Google Earth mentioned on the internets? This much.

A blog to watch if you do GPS: Jeepx.

CNET asks, Where on Google Earth is this? Brand watchers among us, note how CNET did not ask “Where on MSN Live Local…”, “Where on World Wind…” (despite the lovely alliteration) or “Where on ESRI ArcGIS Explorer…”.

Talking of the competition: Matt Giger, maker of EarthBrowser, has just started blogging. So has Chris Maxwell, a lead developer of World Wind. And Bull’s Rambles, a new blog dedicated to “this and that, mainly World Wind rants” lives up to the promise of its tag line, offering up three reasons why the free version of Google Earth isn’t really free. (Can we really not take screenshots? :-)

Over on Google Earth Community, sysop PenguinOpus informs us that “The road layers have been updated in a number of ways. Have a look in the US, in Canada, in Puerto Rico, and in the US Virgin Islands to see some of the enhancements.”

I don’t immediately notice a difference in appearance (but then, I’ve never looked very closely at the roads). There definitely seems to be a difference in the manner that the roads layer shows up, however, and this change probably matches the improvements for Europe back in December, which aimed to make Google Earth zippier for older systems.

My system went from zippy to… zippy, so if Google Earth got faster for anybody with a slowish computer, do tell.

Some network links really astound with the kind of information they can convey. For example:

Örsted DTU (Technical University of Denmark) does a lot of remote sensing of the polar regions. Some of their projects monitor polar sea ice, and in fact they have a couple of very fancy java applets that shows you the extent of polar ice in real time.

DAMOCLES (“Developing Arctic Modelling and Observing Capabilities for Longterm Environmental Studies”) tries to pin down the effects of climate change on Arctic sea ice by measuring a range of properties, both via satellite and from drift buoys. Damocles (apt name:-) is a brand new project, with barely a home page to its name, but if you dig a bit deeper, you find a network link [kml] that renders all this information about the Arctic sea ice in near real-time, with drift indicators. Wow.

Our receding Arctic icecap is a hot-button issue at the moment, and this network link is precisely the kind of contribution to the debate that science can and should make.

(Aside 1: Though 2D, there are plenty of dimensions of data portrayed by this network link; it reminds me somehow of that graphic of Napoleon’s Russia adventure highlighted by Edward Tufte.)

(Aside 2: And while you’ve got a snapshot of Arctic sea ice on Google Earth, why not complement it with the auroral activity overlays Google Earth Blog linked to last week?)

In case you were wondering if the popularity of Google Earth is straining Google’s servers (and some have wondered), you can rest assured:

In a support forum post, PenguinOpus of the Google Earth team mentions:

Google Earth servers currently have enough capacity that no rate-limiting has occurred in several months. Your performance will be controlled by your own ISP’s throughput and your latency to our servers. Ping kh.google.com. <100msec, good. >200msec, not-so-good.

(Here in Sweden my average ping response is 22.6msec (!))