First Look: Google Earth with YouTube Video

Starting today Google Earth lets us get a little more flavor from the virtually destinations we visit. Google now ties YouTube videos that have been tagged with geographic information to Google Earth destinations.

The end result is a cool new way to explore Google Earth and Google YouTube videos. For example, now when you fly over Boston in Google Earth you can zoom down to destination like Faneuil Hall and peruse YouTube videos taken at that location and posted to YouTube.

To get started exploring Google Earth with YouTube videos embedded in them you have to activate the Featured Content folder in the left-side panel of Google Earth. Here you will find the YouTube button. Once you select the YouTube button all the Google YouTube icons appear all over the globe.

Google doesn't pull each and every video in from YouTube, just the ones where the video authors have put geographic specific information in them (a.k.a. geotagging). This is similar to what Google has allowed users of its Panoramio service to do for some time now.

Panoramio allow you to link images and text to specific geographic locations in Google Maps and Google Earth. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum used this technology to annotate the Darfur genocide with pictures and text embedded in Google Earth. This emerging trend called the GeoWeb is pegged, by some, as the Web's next big thing.

Getting Lost in Google Earth

The new YouTube layer adds an entire new time wasting element to Google Earth. With videos now embedded into the globe you can discover interesting videos you may never have otherwise discovered. For example, I was tickled to find four videos embedded in one of my favorite vacation spots Bar Harbor, Maine.

But Google Earth isn't showing me all the YouTube videos for Bar Harbor - just the ones that have been geotagged with location information. A search for "Bar Harbor, Maine" initiated from the YouTube Website delivered 88 results.

There also seems to be a few kinks for Google to work out of this new feature. I scratched my head when I stumbled upon videos located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean of a person talking about their depression and another of people drinking beers singing along to rap music.

As our Google Earth news story points out Virtual Earth from Microsoft and Yahoo Maps from Yahoo already offer the ability for users to annotate maps with links to Web sites, photos, and videos. But with Google's YouTube being the biggest video sharing Web site on the Internet, Google Earth should have a leg up on the competition.

Comments

for more relevant selection, with Google Earth 4.2, it is also possible to open .kmz files containing videos (from Dailymotion, Youtube, Turnhere, GoogleVideo...) about specific topics.
As an example, here are some videos about world capitals, that I collected from a Wiki : http://www.VeniVidiWiki.eu/kmz/Capitals-V1.0.kmz

Sylvie74

October 16, 2007

7:26 AM PT

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