Google Adds Geographic Layer

Google has just realeased a new "Geographic Web Layer" for Google Earth, turning an already fun application into one that's even richer in photos and info, thanks to Wikipedia, Panoramio, and the Google Earth Community. Made public Saturday, here's what the official Google blog has to say about this:

"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.

Zooming around Google Earth is always mesmerizing, but it just got a little more informative. The product added user descriptions and photos1, pushing a “Geographic Web” layer on top of the landscape. Many such mashups are currently available, but community-powered markups previously required downloading a separate file.

Little icons now indicate selected entries from Wikipedia, geo-tagged photos from Panoramio, and posts by the Google Earth Community. All of this is very sparingly done, but it’s great to see Google incorporating community content into the default version of one of its product.

We didn’t recall hearing of Panoramio2 before, so we looked it up. Turns out it’s a small Spanish photo-sharing startup with just two developers and 50,000 total photos (as of the end of October). Google Earth had previously hyped the Panoramio feed on its download page3. The 3D animated photo mashup is similar to what we’ve seen of Microsoft’s Photosynth4 experiment. Where Photosynth is more elaborate, having pictures rooted to a map and all this surrounding context is the cheapest form of tourism we know of.