20 Jul 2005, 14:53

Geobloggers, now in 3D

Having recently discovered both Geoblogging and Google Earth, the immediate thought that came to mind was: “Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a way to view Geoblogger’s data in Google Earth?” And indeed there already is. It turns out that one of the more powerful but less advertised features of Google Earth is to allow what they call “Network Links“. What that means is that you can point to a remote source to display a point or set of points on the map, complete with descriptions and links to other content, just like a point from Google’s own data (like a result from a local search for a restaurant, for example). This makes Google Earth very open ended in terms of what data it can display and opens up some interesting possibilities. In a sense it’s like having RSS feeds for location based content, and Google Earth could be thought of as the feed reader. For example, if you wrote blog entries while traveling a lot, it would probably be pretty easy rig up a script to associate each blog post with the location where it was written in a network link file for Google Earth. Then any user of Google Earth could add the URL for that file as a network link and be able to see on the map where each post was written. I’ll admit I’m hard pressed to think of any practical use for that particular application, but I sure think it would be cool. Actually now that I think about it you could already do this since Geobloggers will already pick up any bookmarks that you geotag in del.icio.us. So you could just save the links of the relevant posts to del.icio.us, geotag them, and your travelling blogging would be mapped.