Phil Bradley - Internet Consultant. Internet search, web
design/optimization
Google Earth and Google Maps are excellent resources, made even
more so by the utilities and resources that can enhance their use. This short
article goes into a bit more detail. New resources are
added at the bottom of the page.
Google Earth, if you've
not yet discovered it, is a 3D mapping interface to the entire planet. It
allows you to move around the world to any particular location and view it from
space, and then get closer and closer until, in some cases, you can see
individual cars on the street, boats in the water, or various buildings and
monuments. It's a free product and can be downloaded quickly and installed
without any problems at all - although you will need a broadband connection to
both download and view it, since it draws data from Google servers, rather than
storing it on your own machine. There are also various overlays that you can
use, such as roads, borders and other, user added data as well. There are also
various other utilities that are available that you can also use in conjunction
with Google Earth.
Google
Sightseeing is a website that allows you to post interesting places that
you've found on Google Earth, or alternatively you can just spend time looking
at the images, and then visiting them yourself on your own version. Categories
include aircraft, bridges, monuments, structures and weirdness. The site is
being added to on a regular basis, so it's worth checking out or adding to your
RSS feed.
When you're browsing around Google Earth, if you look in the
bottom left hand corner of the interface screen, you'll see that there are a
number of boxes that you can tick to give you more information on the place
that you're looking at. One of these is the
Keyhole Community. If
you're wondering what this is, they can explain it better themselves:
"Keyhole is a computer system that interactively streams more than 10,000
gigabytes of Earth information (images, elevation, business data, ...) to
personal computers over the Internet. As a Keyhole user you can explore the
earth and zoom down to cities and points of interest, seeing buildings, roads,
cars, and even people."If you're interested in finding out more, or perhaps
adding your own data to Google Earth, visit the site and take a look around!
You may want to take your own photographs of places that you have been
and add these to a variety of different systems, such as Flickr or Google
Earth. It's not difficult to do this, but quite complicated unless you know
how. Fortunately, this article from
MAKE:
Blog shows you exactly how to do it, easily and without any fuss at
all.
Another similar resource is the
Google Globe. This again allows you
to add your place (home, work, favorite holiday destination) on the site, and
you can fly directly to that location. Obviously you can also see all of the
other places that people have added to the system as well. The website and
Google Earth interface extremely well with each other.
Another
interesting (although of no practical use to people in the UK)
Google Earth, if
you've not yet discovered it, is a 3D mapping interface to the entire planet.
It allows you to move around the world to any particular location and view it
from space, and then get closer and closer until, in some cases, you can see
individual cars on the street, boats in the water, or various buildings and
monuments. It's a free product and can be downloaded quickly and installed
without any problems at all - although you will need a broadband connection to
both download and view it, since it draws data from Google servers, rather than
storing it on your own machine. There are also various overlays that you can
use, such as roads, borders and other, user added data as well. There are also
various other utilities that are available that you can also use in conjunction
with Google Earth.
Google
Sightseeing is a website that allows you to post interesting places that
you've found on Google Earth, or alternatively you can just spend time looking
at the images, and then visiting them yourself on your own version. Categories
include aircraft, bridges, monuments, structures and weirdness. The site is
being added to on a regular basis, so it's worth checking out or adding to your
RSS feed.
When you're browsing around Google Earth, if you look in the
bottom left hand corner of the interface screen, you'll see that there are a
number of boxes that you can tick to give you more information on the place
that you're looking at. One of these is the
Keyhole Community. If
you're wondering what this is, they can explain it better themselves:
"Keyhole is a computer system that interactively streams more than 10,000
gigabytes of Earth information (images, elevation, business data, ...) to
personal computers over the Internet. As a Keyhole user you can explore the
earth and zoom down to cities and points of interest, seeing buildings, roads,
cars, and even people." If you're interested in finding out more, or
perhaps adding your own data to Google Earth, visit the site and take a look
around!
You may want to take your own photographs of places that you
have been and add these to a variety of different systems, such as Flickr or
Google Earth. It's not difficult to do this, but quite complicated unless you
know how. Fortunately, this article from
MAKE:
Blog shows you exactly how to do it, easily and without any fuss at
all.
Another similar resource is the
Google Globe. This again allows you
to add your place (home, work, favorite holiday destination) on the site, and
you can fly directly to that location. Obviously you can also see all of the
other places that people have added to the system as well. The website and
Google Earth interface extremely well with each other.
Another
interesting (although of no practical use to people in the UK) use of Google
Earth allows you to view
properties for sale
in the Chicago area. It's a really clever idea, and it won't be long before
other estate agents get in on the act.
Perhaps the very best place to go
for information on what you can do with Google Earth is the
Google Earth Hacks site. This is
a fantastic resource, with information, forum, newsletter and downloads that
you can use to make your Google Earth experience even more fantastic. People
post pictures of places that they have found, and there are downloads or
overlays for 3D views of cities, current events, sightseeing, traffic and
weather. If you only visit one site related to Google Earth, it should be this
one.
Google Maps
Try the US version or the
UK version. (There are others, but I
guess these are the two that most people will be interested in.) I probably
don't need to go into too much detail - they're mapping services, and you type
in the place you're interested in, and Google Maps will display the
place/road/whatever for you. You can get directions on how to get there, useful
information regarding the location and so on. I find the scrolling function of
east/west/north/south is very smooth, as is the ability to zoom in or zoom
out.
Google Maps
Mania is a weblog with lots of new information about how Google Maps are
being used. It also has an RSS feed if you want to keep up to date.
Google Maps
transparencies is a very nice site. It allows you to view a Google Map from
the satellite view, but overlay that with the map view. You can also toggle the
views as well. It's a great way of finding a particular place and then seeing
the satellite view (or vice versa) quickly and easily.
Google Weather
Maps is another useful function you can use in conjunction with Google
Maps. Simply type in the place that you're interested in (not only the US, but
if you're looking at other countries, check the 'About' link to find out how to
input that data), and you can then see the temperature and so on. It also works
with Google Earth, but only for US states.
There are even games that you
can play with Google Maps. This one,
Find the landmark, displays
the name of a place and you then have to find it as quickly as possible.
The competition
Of course, Microsoft and the rest are not just standing around
letting Google take all the glory in this area; they are trying to fight back.
Microsoft is confident that they can produce a better product, which they are
calling Virtual Earth. If you're interested in learning more, probably the best
place to go is Channel 9, which
has a lot of links and a 30 minute video broadcast about it.
A9 is also getting in on the mapping business
although they are providing a slightly different approach, by giving visitors
the opportunity to view city blocks. If you go to a limited number of US cities
you can look at the maps, and some places will indicate that you can 'walk'
along the road, viewing the buildings that you would pass if you were
physically there. It's a really nice idea, and worth a few minutes of your
time. As yet however, it is US only.
Yahoo also has a
map service, but it's very much in its
infancy and, in my opinion, not worth wasting time with. It doesn't really do
anything that the other systems don't, though to be fair it does give very
quick access to nearby hospitals, museums and so on.
Miscellaneous resources
Not directly linked to either Google Earth or Google Maps, but
still of interest are a couple of other resources.
43Places is a site that you can use to add
in photographs of places that you've visited, and share stories. It's also a
nice place to get in touch with people to have been to a particular location,
or who want to.
World66 is a fun
little utility. It provides you with a list of countries in the world, you tick
the ones that you've visited, and it will create a map of the world that you
have visited, and tell you what percentage of the worlds countries you've been
to. It also works for US states and European countries as well. If you have a
mind to, you can save the map and display it on your own site for example.
New resources
Since I originally wrote this article a number of other
resources have been added. I'm mentioning them briefly below.
Google Address Translation This
is a hack that brings the power of address translation (converting a US Postal
Address into a Latitude/Longitude) to the Google Maps API - something that
wasn't provided in the default distribution.
Housing Maps (US) Want to live somewhere
else? This resource might help.
