Tracking Hurricane Gustav in Google Earth

As menacing Hurricane Gustav approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast, we've added a "Hurricane Gustav" folder under the "Weather" folder in Google Earth.Expand the folder to find the latest advisory from the National Hurricane Center, a forecast track (also from the NHC), and a set of webcams in and around Louisiana, provided to us by Weather Bonk. We may be adding more information into the folder as the situation unfolds.Please keep in mind when tracking...

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Tip of the week: Lat Long on Lat/Long

Every now and then, we mention that you can do a search in Google Maps or Google Earth using latitude and longitude coordinates. But sometimes the coordinates are just what you're looking for, so here's a quick tip on how to find them. In Google Earth, browse over to the location for which you'd like to find the coordinates, then click on the "Add Placemark" button in the toolbar. This will automatically put a placemark in the center of the screen and open a dialogue box that shows you the coordinates for that spot, but you can also move the placemark...

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GPS trails in Google Earth

This week, we've added another layer to the Gallery in Google Earth. Spain-based Wikiloc aggregates thousands of GPS tracks for various outdoor activities provided by its growing user community. The layer not only lets you display the GPS tracks in Google Earth, but gives you additional information like the distance covered, the elevation maxima, a personal description of the trip as well as pictures taken by the user. This can be interesting to...

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Just When You Think You've Seen It All...

Looks like it's time to replace that rickety compass with a few hundred of your favorite cattle. Ok, not that you would - but according to a team of German zoologists and the research they did using Google Earth, apparently you could. Using Google Earth's satellite imagery, these zoologists observed the grazing tendencies of thousands of cattle from hundreds of different herds around the world and concluded that the vast majority of these animals position themselves according to our planet's magnetic poles, facing almost due north or south....

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From Google Maps to gold medal

My reconnaissance of the Beijing Olympic Time Trial all started in December 2007. My coach Jim Miller and I traveled to Beijing, China to not only check out and ride the Time Trial course, and to experience the heavily publicized pollution problem first hand. (During my Gold Medal ride, it turned out to be a perfect day in Beijing.) Much of the hype with the course centered on how non-traditional this 15-mile course was, especially with the...

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Design Your Dwelling Competition: one week left!

(cross-posted from the SketchUp blog)Just a reminder that the Design Your Dwelling competition is closing this Sunday, August 31st. If you haven't submitted your model yet, start by visiting the site location in Google Earth. Each model must be uploaded to the Google 3D Warehouse and be submitted through the Dwell entry form. The chosen design will win a trip to San Francisco (airfare and hotel accommodations included), have lunch with Dwell & SketchUp staff, attend the Dwell/AIA home tours and receive a physical...

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Tip of the week: Shortcuts

Here's a brief primer on some of the shortcuts you can use while browsing Google Maps. With your mouse, you can zoom in and out: double left-click to zoom in on the area you're clicking, and double right-click (also known as Ctrl+Click for Mac users) to zoom out. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can also use that to zoom in and out.You can also zoom in and out with the "+" and "-" keys. There are some other keyboard shortcuts: with the arrow keys, you can pan left, right, up, and down with each respective arrow. Using the arrows moves the...

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Map of champions

If you've been consoling yourself for not being in Beijing by jaunting around in the Google Maps 2008 Summer Games website, you'll find further comfort with this great mashup from Earthgamz.  Check out the placemarks for athletes' hometowns and training cities, which also link to their official profiles and schedules of their events.  Focus your browsing by country and sport with the popup menus.  This is a...

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Tip of the week: Learning from Mapplets

As students prepare to head back to school, it seems like a good time to share some fun ways to use Mapplets to get students and curious minds interested in discovering new places. To start, you can grab their attention with dynamic 360º panoramas of cities throughout the world. Show them the Earth at night or take a visual tour of the 7 Wonders of the World. Now that you've got them hooked, integrate cool visuals with course curricula and informational maps, such as the amount of sea level rise.To access these Mapplets and many others just go...

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Poetry, community, and forty fabulous islands

The poet John Donne once said, "No man is an island" - and for those of us who've had the opportunity to see our users map their world, we believe in the collective knowledge of communities sharing what they know best about the places where they've lived, visited, or explored. Not too long ago, we announced the launch of Google Map Maker - a tool that allows users to build maps of their neighborhoods, cities and countries. Today, we're excited to open up Google Map Maker to forty island nations. For those of you new to Google Map Maker, check...

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Where is Georgia on Google Maps?

The recent conflict in Georgia has raised some questions about how Google Maps has handled mapping in that part of the world. The most obvious question is, why doesn't Google Maps show any cities or roads for Georgia, or its neighbors Armenia and Azerbaijan? The answer is we never launched coverage in those countries because we simply weren't satisfied with the map data we had available. We're constantly searching for the best map data we can find, and sometimes will delay launching coverage in a country if we think we can get more comprehensive...

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Google Earth Geographic Web updates

Organizing the world's spatial information means benefiting from the collective knowledge and experiences of people around the globe. Making this information universally accessible enables you to discover the world and its places, not only as they are, but as you make them. That's why we now have the "Places" layer. With this release, we've combined user-generated content from sources including Wikipedia, Panoramio, the Google Earth Community, and...

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Off to the Games!

The 2008 Summer Games will soon commence in Beijing and will run from August 8th to August 24th. You may have noticed that we recently updated our satellite imagery in Beijing, have added detailed bilingual maps in China, and have created a collection of 3D stadiums using Google SketchUp.In addition to all of this, today we're launching the 2008 Summer Games on Google Maps. It's a one-stop shop for viewing live updates from the Games, including up-to-date...

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Tip of the week: Link directly to a Mapplet

Have you ever found a Mapplet you really wanted to share? You might have tried the "link" feature on Maps, and been frustrated that it only links to the My Maps tab instead of directly to whichever Mapplet you selected. Well, there is in fact a simple method to link directly to a Mapplet, and it will even get rid of the Mapplets interface typically shown in the My Maps tab.The trick is to construct a URL in the following format:http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=[insert...

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More streets in more places

Earlier this summer we launched our first international Street View coverage with the Tour de France route. Today I'm excited to announce we're bringing Street View to new corners of the globe as we launch imagery in Japan and Australia.Our Japan launch includes a number of major cities including Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, among others across the country.View Larger MapView Larger MapOur imagery for Australia includes extensive coverage throughout the country, featuring cities such as Sydney, Perth, and Melbourne - and many places in between....

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Olympic imagery update

I'm very pleased to announce that we've published brand new imagery of Beijing in time for the Olympics, and that some of the new imagery is less than 2 weeks old! Everyone on the imagery team is very excited to make this data available to you just before the start of the games; it's very hard to get good satellite photos of Beijing due to clouds and other atmospheric conditions, but our partners GeoEye and DigitalGlobe pulled through and were able to get us some really amazing shots. Some updated areas include Beijing, Tianjin, Shenyang, and Quindao...

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