Wikipedia and Panoramio Layers for Google Earth
I tell you what, if you haven’t downloaded Google Earth by now, you are missing out, not only are they getting ready to release a new version, they also have layers, a great way for others to add content to Google Earth, just like these great new Geographic layers Google released with location-specific Wikipedia content, Panoramio photos, and community comments. Click here for a screenshot.
The new Geographic Web layer we released today is one of those features. We’ve taken the rich data of Wikipedia, Panoramio, and the Google Earth Community and made a browsable layer in Google Earth. Now you can fly anywhere in the world and see what people have written about it, photographed, or posted. I went hopping around from the southern tip of South America to the mosques in the Middle East to the Maldives Islands, immersed in a wealth of information, and I really felt like I was visiting each place through eyes of people who had been there. It was really engaging to compare, say, the Grand Canyon through the photos in Panoramio to the view from Google Earth, where I could follow the Colorado River through each.
To experience this for yourself, all you need to do is start Google Earth and explore the world. As of today you will see new icons – the Wikipedia globe, the Panoramio star, or the information “i” of the Google Earth Community – so just click on any of them to explore information about a place. You can also easily turn it off in the Layers panel on the lower left. Source: Google Blog via Lifehacker
I will be posting more links to great Google Earth Layers shortly.
[...] I was going to post on a couple more Google Earth Layers but that just keeps leading to more and more layers, so I thought I would just do one big post on all of the great Google layers I ran into today. Oh, and here is a link to the last post, Wikipedia and Panoramio Layers for Google Earth I posted earlier. [...]