Google Earth: Zero Hour +1 If Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was responsible for a productivity loss of $600 million (for people playing hooky), then the release of Google Earth has to be responsible for at least $100m. So the next question is...what's next? When you think about all the Google Maps hacks, from craigslist, to GasBuddy (offline), Chicago Crimestats and Transit Maps, London Traffic Cams, various sight seeing sites, NYC Subway Stops, plus integration with BlogWise, Terraserver, Host-IP (broken?), Yahoo Traffic, and the US Census, you might wonder what else could be integrated into gEarth?

Things I'm hoping for? How about integrating historical markers, daytrip resources, factory tours, social demographics (like Nationmaster), politics (fundraising, election results, registration, polling place location, election irregularities), mapped to do lists, real-time weather and traffic, things that aren't there anymore, custom atlas creation, IMDB movie location shoots, tighter integration with topographical maps, WiFi access Points, a News Attention Index, shipwrecks, Job Searches, and tighter integration with the USGS. As shown in the gEarth interface (left hand side, first one in "Layers"), their online community is already working on using, improving, and customizing gEarth's new features, including some updates (Caution, requires the integration of *.kml file, *.eta, or *.kmz files.)
posted by rzklkng on Jun 29, 2005 - 21 comments