One of the original Google Earth hacks, a network link for geocaches on geocaching.com by Andy Fowler, was taken down in September at the behest of geocaching.com’s owners. The reason? Geocaching now has its own network link up. You have to register, but it’s part of their free service. Google Earth Blog has the details.

Google Earth Blog: New Beta Version of Google Earth (3.0.0693)

Here are the release notes. As google Earth blog notes, this is a bug-fix release, mainly.

All Points Blog points to a San Jose Mercury News article that has Google talking to CoStar, a real estate information aggregator, with a view to possibly offering premium real estate search services in Google Maps or Earth.

In today’s installment, Times of India reports on India’s science and technology secretary V S Ramamoorthy’s entry into the fray. More interesting is the last part of the article, where you’ll find the best defence yet of Google coming out of India, by none other than India’s military. Quote:

Yet, only last month, the armed forces had said that they had factored into their operational plans the threat of the satellite imagery of their military bases being freely available on the Net.

One senior officer had stated that, ‘One can even buy satellite imagery in the international market. If we have satellite pictures of Pakistani military bases, so do they. Modern day warfare is more about tactics, speed and deception. Moreover, satellite pictures available on the Internet are not real-time and serve no operational purpose’.

As for frontline IAF bases, they have ‘adequate protection systems’ in place, with even measures to thwart hostile attempts at ‘thermal imagery’ through ‘decoys’. Similarly, it does not matter if a satellite captures aircraft carrier INS Viraat berthed at Mumbai. ‘Ships are mobile platforms here today and somewhere else tomorrow,’, a Navy officer had said.

It looks like we’ll have to start following World Wind Central as well: The Blue Marble: Next Generation add-on for NASA World Wind turns out to also exists as a KMZ layer (scroll to bottom). What does it do?

Blue Marble: Next Generation offers a year’s worth of monthly [MODIS] composites at a spatial resolution of 500 meters. These monthly images reveal seasonal changes to the land surface: the green-up and dying-back of vegetation in temperate regions such as North America and Europe; dry and wet seasons in the tropics, and advancing and retreating Northern Hemisphere snow cover.

(Via this Google Earth Community post)

Here is a nice network link worth keeping: Aeronautical Sectional Charts of the United States, uploaded to Google Earth Hacks by Forkboy2. He (she?) writes:

Improvements include much smaller image files for better performance (and no loss of image quality), changed the icon from a generic push pin to an airplane, changed it to a network linked KMZ so that any future improvements will update automatically on your system, and some other surprises.

A confusing and confused article in the UK tabloid the Sun states that “the British islands in the South Atlantic have been given Argentinian place names on the interactive Google Earth site.”

Well, in Maps the Spanish names are appended in parentheses. I have no problems with that, as it makes the map more useful to finding the islands when cross-referencing from other (Spanish-language) sources. (No access to Earth right now so if somebody could check…)

The Sun, however, loves to get on a patriotic high horse every so often, so we’ll see how this plays out.

[Update 15:20 UTC: Just had a look at Google Earth’s representation of the Falklands. Searching for either “malvinas” or “falkland islands” (but not “falklands”) gets you there, with your search term of choice displayed atop the islands. Once there, if you have place names turned on you also get to see an ‘official’ “Falkand Islands” title. If you have the Google Earth BBS Earthbrowsing category turned on, then you also get to see a collection of Spanish-language placemarks. Perhaps it is this that the Sun objected to? It’s slim pickings for patriotic fulminating in any case.]