Tip of the Week: Model the underwater world

[Cross-posted with the SketchUp blog]

A few weeks ago, you saw the tour of 3D models under the ocean for the Google Earth 5.0 launch. With the SketchUp maintenance software that released yesterday, you too can model your very own underwater world! The first thing you'll have to do is to download the latest version of SketchUp here. Once installed, a few simple options in SketchUp enable you to select whether your model is above or below the water:

1. Go to 'Window' then 'Preferences'
2. Choose 'Extensions' in the left column
3. Toggle on 'Google Earth Ocean Modeling'
4. Hit OK

This will give you the option to place your model wherever you want it. Next import your desired terrain from Google Earth by finding the area you want and choosing 'Get Current View' in SketchUp. Underwater terrain will import just like above water terrain. It's easy to lose your sense of scale in the ocean, and if you get a warning that reads 'Camera altitude too high...' just move closer to the ocean floor. With your terrain imported into SketchUp, you can start your model.

Once complete, decide whether your model will be on the ocean floor or on the surface. You can find that option under the 'Plugins' menu. If you're modeling on the land, or wish to model on the surface of the water, toggle it off, like this:

If you're modeling under the surface of the water, toggle it on, like this:

If you want your model to be somewhere in-between the ocean floor and the surface of the water, simply choose 'Model on Ocean Floor' and place your model above the terrain:

Last, view your model in Google Earth by choosing 'Place model', and see how it looks. If you are satisfied, load your model onto the 3D Warehouse by selecting 'Share Model' and it may show up in the 3D Buildings layer. The same terms that apply to buildings on land also apply to underwater models. Your submissions must be real, accurate, and correctly located. There are lots of opportunities for geo-located models underwater; ship wrecks, diver destinations and offshore structures! Don't forget to fill out the appropriate information on the upload page, and to check 'Google Earth ready'. And that's it! Piece of cake. Sponge cake.

Posted by Adam Hecht, 3D Data Specialist

Explore more with User Photos in Street View

Starting today, a new feature lets you browse popular user-contributed photos from Panoramio at major landmarks around the world. The many people who virtually visit Paris to see the famous Eiffel Tower or the Notre Dame cathedral in Street View can now also browse the wide array of user photos taken in the vicinity. Just look for photo thumbnails at the top right of the Street View image, and click to view. You can also connect directly to the community behind this great photo content - a link to the author's Panoramio page is shown with every user photo.

The feature is available in many other places too: New York, San Francisco, Rome, Tokyo, Barcelona, Sydney and New Zealand, to name just a few. Anywhere, really, where Street View is available and where users have contributed lots of high-quality photos; of course, this usually is near famous landmarks but you never know where you'll discover more to see. With user-contributed photos you can inspect architectural details and close-up quirks, or see what is happening at a place at more than one time of day, or see whatever else it was that inspired the photographer to press the button. Take a look at this video to see more: 

If you are a Panoramio user, you may already have a photo in Street View. If not, what are you waiting for? Just contribute your best photos to Panoramio and remember to geo-tag them. Google's image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location. At the most famous places in the world, competition for space is already tough -- take a look at the range of images of the Sagrada Familia -- but on less travelled roads the world is still largely a blank canvas. Please help to fill it in!

Posted by Frederik Schaffalitzky, Software Engineer, Google Zurich

Graduation day for Map Maker

Today, maps of 16 countries have graduated from Google Maps Maker to Google Maps. Adding the data generated in Map Maker to Google Maps has been highly requested by the Map Maker community from practically the day it was launched. Following our recent API launch, we continue in our quest to make the efforts of all our users as fruitful to the community as we can.

To celebrate this launch, we have put together a page full of great maps by our users - this page is awe inspiring. This launch is a testament to the spirit of map makers who have taken it upon themselves to map entire neighborhoods -- and in some cases entire cities and counties. We have observed many users add more than 1,000 edits to maps and a few have even made 10,000. Even in countries where not many have access to high-speed internet, we have found expatriates and caring users living abroad helping map countries they are far away from. Hats off to all you map makers out there!

Following are the 16 countries that now have data available in Google Maps: Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Guam, Iceland, Mauritius, Paraguay, Philippines, Senegal, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.

Here are a few snapshots that show some of the vital contributions made by the users of Google Map Maker:

Santa Cruz (Bolvia)

Senegal

Vietnam

Posted by Anand Srinivasan, Lakshminath Bhuvanagiri and Jessica Pfund, Map Maker Team

Atlantis? No, it Atlant-isn't.

[Note: Last week we saw some interesting speculation that Atlantis had been found in Google Earth. As much as we'd love for that to be the case, there is a scientific explanation for the odd markings found on the seafloor. We've invited two of the scientists who gathered the data that appears in Google Earth to answer some questions that came up. - Ed.]

Since the launch of Ocean in Google Earth, millions of people have started to explore the ocean, and many have been surprised by their discoveries.

Near Hawaii you can see a new volcanic island in the making called the Loihi Seamount.

You can also clearly see the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an underwater mountain range in the Atlantic Ocean where two tectonic plates are moving away from one another. If you look closely, you can see this ridge connects with others around the globe, forming a nearly continuous mountain range that is over 60,000 kilometers long.

But so far nothing has sparked quite as much interest as this funny looking pattern off the west coast of Africa:


Patterns like this can actually be seen over much of the ocean floor in Google Earth. What is it? Is it real? Why does it look like this?

Some have speculated that these are the plow marks of seafloor farming by aliens. If there really are little green men hiding somewhere, the ocean's not a bad place to do it. Mars, Venus, the moon, and even some asteroids are mapped at far higher resolution than our own oceans (the global map of Mars is about 250 times as accurate as the global map of our own ocean).

One theory that's gained more traction is that these marks might be the ruins of the lost city of Atlantis. If that were the case, some of the city blocks would have to be over eight miles long - that's about fifty times the size of a city block in New York City (if you zoom in and use the measurement tool in Google Earth, you can do this comparison yourself).

So what is it? The scientific explanation is a bit less exotic, but we think it's still pretty interesting: these marks are what we call "ship tracks." You see, it's actually quite hard to measure the depth of the ocean. Sunlight, lasers, and other electromagnetic radiation can travel less than 100 feet below the surface, yet the typical depth in the ocean is more than two and a half miles. Sound waves are more effective. By measuring the time it takes for sound to travel from a ship to the sea floor and back, you can get an idea of how far away the sea floor is. Since this process — known as echosounding — only maps a strip of the sea floor under the ship, the maps it produces often show the path the ship took, hence the "ship tracks." In this case, the soundings produced by a ship are also about 1% deeper than the data we have in surrounding areas — likely an error — making the tracks stand out more. You can see all of the soundings that produced this particular pattern with this KMZ file.

Echosounding with sonar is currently the best method for collecting this kind of data, but it's not perfect. One challenge is that it's quite slow. It has to be done from ships or underwater vehicles, and they can't go very fast or they'll spoil the measurement. As a result, not much of the ocean has been mapped this way, and huge gaps remain all over the ocean. In fact, the typical hole between tracks is about 20,000 square kilometers, or about the size of the state of New Jersey.

Now you're probably wondering where the rest of the depth data comes from if there are such big gaps from echosounding. We do our best to predict what the sea floor looks like based on what we can measure much more easily: the water surface. Above large underwater mountains (seamounts), the surface of the ocean is actually higher than in surrounding areas. These seamounts actually increase gravity in the area, which attracts more water and causes sea level to be slightly higher. The changes in water height are measurable using radar on satellites. This allows us to make a best guess as to what the rest of the sea floor looks like, but still at relatively low resolutions (the model predicts the ocean depth about once every 4000 meters). What you see in Google Earth is a combination of both this satellite-based model and real ship tracks from many research cruises (we first published this technique back in 1997). If you zoom in and take a look around the ocean for yourself, you can see higher resolution patches where ships have studied the sea floor and all the places we've still yet to explore. Here's a good example just north of Hawaii:

So, what if we really wanted to find Atlantis? We probably couldn't do it with satellites — man-made structures simply aren't big enough to be measured that way. But we could map the whole ocean using ships. A published U.S. Navy study found that it would take about 200 ship-years, meaning we'd need one ship for 200 years, or 10 ships for 20 years, or 100 ships for two years. It costs about $25,000 per day to operate a ship with the right mapping capability, so 200 ship-years would cost nearly two billion dollars. That may seem like a lot of money, but it's not that far off from the price tag of, say, a new sports stadium.

For now, keep exploring the ocean in Google Earth, and continue to share what you discover. It's great to have so many sets of eyes looking at the data currently in Google Earth and asking questions about what it represents. We and our fellow oceanographers are constantly improving the resolution of our seafloor maps, so we promise to work with Google to keep the virtual explorers out there busy.

Posted by Walter Smith, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and David Sandwell, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego

Mapping CO2 emissions

At Google, we make engineering decisions based on careful data collection and analysis. So when I tried, on my own, to understand deeper the issues of the global climate change, I realized that while general information is widely available, it's not easy to find detailed data. What exactly is my individual impact? How much greenhouse gases do people produce during various activities? How exactly do different localities compare to each other?

While several reports and inventories of human fossil fuel CO2 emissions in the US already exist, the most comprehensive one that I know of was produced by Project Vulcan, a team of scientists lead by Dr Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University. Vulcan data represent detailed emissions for all 50 US states in 2002. Dr Gurney presented the most recent results of his work this week at a meeting of North American Carbon Program.

The results produced by Project Vulcan are publicly available, but they are not easy to analyze for a non-scientist, so during my 20% time at Google I have created dynamic maps of the Vulcan data, broken down by sector. You can view the maps in your browser if you have Google Earth plugin installed, or you can load the data in Google Earth itself.

By looking at the data on a map, you can see for yourself what US states and counties have the highest and the lowest emission rates - absolute or per capita. You can notice where people burn more gasoline for driving, or where they use more fuel for heating and cooling their homes and businesses.

Here's a video with a Google Earth flythrough and a commentary explaining various data layers.


Finally, I would like to thank fellow Googlers Christiaan Adams, Frank Dachille, and Jake Knapp, and other individuals who provided feedback on this map!

Posted by Simon Ilyushchenko, Site Reliability Engineer

Map Making in your language on your website

Over the last 7 months, map makers around the world have been busy mapping their locales using Google Map Maker. From Chile to Vietnam Google Map Makers added cities, villages, lakes, roads and businesses to the map. The resulting maps in 164 countries are some of the best ever seen for these regions.

We've taken another step in providing easy access to these maps by making Map Maker maps available in the Google Maps API and as static maps. If you have a Google Maps mashup that is primarily used in one of these countries or you simply want to embed a map in your blog post or web page, you can now serve these maps that are updated every day by switching a parameter in the API. Here's an example of the Map Maker static map of Reykjavik, Iceland (on the left) compared with what you will get from a vanilla static map (on the right). For reference, the URL used to generate this map is: http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=64.14607,-21.945148&zoom=14&size=512x512&maptype=mapmaker-roadmap&key=MAPS_API_KEY&sensor=false

For more details on how to use these maps, see the Google Geo Developers Blog.

If all you want is to view the updated maps in Google Maps, you can now add this Mapplet to Google Maps and view the latest and greatest from the community.

Many Voices

Also keeping with our mission of making the world's geographic information universally accessible and useful, we are proud to announce that Google Map Maker is now available in 27 languages at mapmaker.google.com. This represents the primary or second language of more than a half billion people in the 164 countries covered by Google Map Maker.

Users can already add data in every language supported by your keyboard; simply switch to that language on your keyboard and start typing. For example if users name a road in two languages, we will render it in both languages - here is one such place in Pakistan.

Lastly, if you can't find your native language in this list, worry not! We've opened the Map Maker interface for translation to any language using the Google in Your Language program.

Posted by Lalitesh Katragadda, Map Maker Creator and Lior Ron, Google Maps Product Manager

Another round of updates for Google Transit

Many people around the world tell us that using Google Transit on the desktop or on their mobile makes using public transportation much more convenient for them. We haven't reached our dream of having coverage for all public transit agencies, but we've been working hard to keep getting closer to that goal. Today I am pleased to announce another significant update with the launch of several major updates for full schedule routing around the world and more than ten new cities in the Transit Layer.

As a reminder, with the Google Transit feature on Google Maps you can get step-by-step transit directions in your web browser and on your mobile phone, find transit stops in your area and view station information and schedules. In addition to that, the Transit Layer overlays public transportation lines visually on Google Maps, mostly in places where the local public transportation agency has not yet partnered with us to get their full schedule data online.

Transit full schedules launches
Recently we launched full schedules for Transit among others in Calgary, Hamilton, Edmonton, and York Region in Canada; East Midlands (UK); Houston (TX); 21 agencies in the state of Virginia, as well as a substantial data set in China, connecting all provinces with 3100 train lines, covering about 2700 stations and all major cities (for example, try Beijing to Shanghai). In all those cities you can route around with public transportation by using Google Maps on the desktop or your mobile.

Transit Layer launches
We're adding to the 50+ cities we launched at the beginning of this year. New cities include: Adelaide, Atlanta, Bonn, Calgary, Davis, California, Hamilton, Canada, Pilsen, Sacramento, Torino, Toronto York region, and we've launched updates for Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria. In all those cities you can visually see public transportation lines on Google Maps and interact with the Layer by clicking on stations.

You can find more information about Google Transit and our current coverage at http://maps.google.com/transit.

Posted by Raphael Leiteritz, Product Manager

1000 is the new 10

Ever wish you could see more than just ten local search results at once? Us too.

So we've added a search layer for local search results that activates when there are more relevant results than we can show on one page. Instead of just plotting the first page of business results on our map, we plot more of them as small circles. You can click on the circles to get more information about the businesses they represent. The top ten results will still appear in the left-hand pane and as pins on the map.
 
For example, there might be a coffee shop just around the corner from your house in Seattle, that didn't make it to the first page because Seattle has so many coffeehouses. You can now browse for it with the query: coffee in Seattle.

My coworker Berni, who travels a lot, says he's going to put this feature to use when visiting a new city -- for example, he can search for dancing sydney and look at where the results are clustered to plan his night out. 

Or, you might be in New York and searching for places convenient to your particular subway line. Now you can visually scan the results with a query like wine New York, then pan down into Brooklyn to see more options.

To visualize an even wider distribution, you could either zoom out from an existing query, or directly search for something like snow removal USA:

We're initially launching this feature for maps.google.com, but stay tuned for it to be available on other domains in the near future. Update (3/9): I'm happy to announce that this feature is now available for all Google Maps domains, so now you can put it to use wherever you are. Enjoy!

Posted by Nina Kang, Staff Software Engineer

Calling all business owners

As an avid Google Maps user, I find myself turning to the map to search for increasingly varied types of local information.  From simply locating an address to looking for a very specific type of business, I always check the map first.  

In fact, Google Maps was the only way I was able to find Ski Guides Hawaii, a small ski and snowboard rental operation that rents equipment to those looking for the ultimate adventure--skiing on the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii.  When I arrived to pick up my skis, the owner was amazed to hear that I'd found him on Google Maps.  Like many business owners, he didn't know about Local Business Center or realize that he could edit his listing on Google Maps.  

Local Business Center allows business owners to edit the content of their existing listing, or to add a brand new listing to Google's local database.  By ensuring that basic information is up-to-date and providing additional details, like photos, hours, and coupons, business owners can stand out on the map to attract more customers. To make the process even easier, we've put together a getting started video that walks through the sign up process and benefits of Local Business Center.  Enjoy, and share with your entrepreneurial friends!   

Posted by Laura Melahn, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Tour 3D models in the new Ocean layer

[Cross-posted with the SketchUp blog]

For the exciting release of Google Earth 5.0, the Google SketchUp team built a series of 3D models to highlight the new Ocean layer. Google Earth 5.0 now allows you to navigate under the surface of the sea and explore the ocean floor to see shipwrecks, submarines, buoys, and much more. We've put together a placemark tour to help easily find the 3D models in the ocean. To access the tour, download the kml file from the Google Earth Gallery page. The tour will visit models such as the Titanic, Batttleship Bismark, Aquarius underwater laboratory, as well as other submarines, shipwrecks, and dive destinations. Please make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth 5.0 and the 3D Buildings layer turned on.

You can also find these models in the Google Earth - Ocean Layer collection in the Google 3D Warehouse. The SketchUp team added over 80 3D models to the 3D Buildings layer including models of NOAA moored buoys taking wind, wave, meteorological, and oceanographic measurements around the coasts of the United States. 

Posted by Adam Hecht, 3D Data Specialist

Happy trails with My Tracks

Last week you heard about the new GPS track functionality in Google Earth 5.0. Well, you now have another way to record and visualize your outdoor activities with today's launch of My Tracks. My Tracks is an application for Android-powered phones such as the T-Mobile G1 that makes use of the phone's built-in GPS to let you record your adventures, which you can then visualize and share using Google Maps. You can find out more about My Tracks in the video below and over on the Official Google Blog.

Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager and former professional cyclist

Australian fires update

The Google Australia Blog continues to update its map of the Victoria fires, and it now includes recent satellite imagery from the Modis Rapid Response project at NASA/GSFC. You can also view the map, further information about the fires, and recent news on this site. 


Posted by Elaine Filadelfo, Lat Long Blog Team

Mapping the Australian fires

[Cross-posted from the Google Australia Blog. Updates will be posted on the Google Australia Blog. --Ed.]

Over the weekend, a terrible bushfire tragedy has been unfolding in Victoria, Australia.

We've today pulled together a Flash Map, containing the latest up-to-date information about fire locations and their status from the Country Fire Authority (CFA). The Flash Map is updated in real-time from the CFA website via an RSS feed. We hope that it's of some use to people who may be affected, to emergency services personnel, and that it takes some load off other websites which are being inundated. The map certainly makes the scale of this disaster immediately apparent.

Update at 6:10pm Victoria time: To explain the map, the number in each marker shows the number of fires at the location. A green marker means the area is called "safe" by the CFA. Yellow means "controlled". Orange means "contained". Red means "going".

Update at 8:45pm. Address search functionality added.

Victoria Fires Map
	Gadgets powered by Google

If you want to embed a gadget containing this map on your website, you can do so by clicking here.

We're working to incorporate additional bushfire information into the map and will let you know of any additional updates on this blog.

There's a lot of additional information on the web about the location and status of fires and road closures, and what to do to keep safe. Due to traffic load, please only visit the first three sites below if your personal safety is potentially impacted by the fires.

• The Department of Sustainability and Environment has more information on major fires on public land.
  
• The CFA have incident reports (this is the source for the Flash Map)
  
• VicRoads has information about road closures.
  
• V-Line has information about rail closures.
  
• The teams at news.com.au and theage.com.au have created useful My Maps on Google Maps, containing news and information about major fires and casualties.

Our thoughts go out to all those affected by this tragedy, and our thanks to the brave members of the Victorian police, Country Fire Authority and emergency services who are working so hard to save lives.

Posted by Alan Noble, Raul Vera and Pamela Fox, Google Engineering

See your friends on a map with Google Latitude

I'm a pretty spontaneous gal; I moved to London a few months ago just to see what it was like [for those of you wondering, this side of the pond is brilliant!]. This personality trait has made it difficult to keep in touch with my friends, which is why I'm so excited about Google Latitude. Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps for mobile (and an iGoogle gadget using Google Maps), which allows you to share your location with the friends you choose. You can get an idea of where they are and what they are up to, and easily keep in touch with them.

A couple of weeks back I decided--last-minute as usual--to hop on a plane to Washington D.C. to take in the Inauguration. I wasn't entirely sure where I'd stay or whom I'd run into during my patriotic ex-pat frenzy, but shortly after my arrival I got an email from Steve Lee (a Google Mountain View Product Manager) that said "You are in DC? Me too! How long are you in town? Let's meet up!" 

Steve's a pretty smart guy, but he doesn't have ESP -- it was Google Maps for mobile's new Latitude feature that made this cross-the-pond meetup possible. I had shared my location with Steve on Latitude, so he just opened up Google Maps on his phone and saw my new location.   

Thanks to Latitude, I feel connected to the people I care about no matter where I am. I can be spontaneous and still have a great time with the friends I love all around the world. Be spontaneous! Try Google Latitude by visiting google.com/latitude from your phone browser or PC browser. You can control your location and who gets to see it; to learn more about the privacy features, check out this video.

To find out more about Google Latitude, check out this post on the Google Mobile blog and watch this demo video:

Posted by Sara Rowghani, Product Marketing Manager, Google UK

Taking in the view: Introducing Google's Imagery Partner Program

When people think about Google Earth, they often think satellite imagery.  Yet, since the early days of Google Earth, we've been working with local governments and other public sector organizations to add their aerial imagery as well.  Thanks to this data sharing, we're able to offer our users a more current representation of thousands of communities and a higher resolution view of countless geographic features.  With this week's launch of the historical imagery feature in Google Earth, we're now able to partner with public sector organizations and other imagery content providers to present users a view of their community or geographic features, such as mountains or lakes, evolving over time.

For organizations that would like to share their aerial imagery, we’ve just put out the welcome mat  — a new website for our Imagery Partner Program where you can learn the ins and outs of adding your organization’s imagery to Google's services.  As you'll see, we've learned from our partnerships with many governments and have structured this program to make it as easy as possible for your organization to license and deliver your data to Google.  Wondering what aerial imagery formats we welcome or how we handle data transfer or other details?  Visit the site and check out the FAQ.

Now that we've expanded the number of partner programs we offer, which already include the Cities in 3D Program and Google Transit Partner Program, we want to make it easier for you and your colleagues to learn and stay informed about all the ways you can add your map content to Google's services.  Check out our new site for Map Content Partners, with the easy to remember URL, google.com/mapcontent, and spread the word.

Posted by Scott Ciabattari, Content Partnerships

Google Earth's flying tour bus

How often have you flown around Google Earth and thought to yourself, "Man! This looks so cool... I wish I could share this with my friends"? For me, it's been every day for almost four years. You see, I started using Google Earth years ago to plan and record my paragliding flights. Ever since I started flying, I've been obsessed with sharing the breathtaking views, the complete sense of freedom, and the crazy adventures that I've had traveling around with my glider. Google Earth is an amazing tool, but it was always difficult to use to share those adventures with others without sitting down with someone and helping them navigate around. After joining the Google Earth team, what started as a flying obsession turned into something much larger: creating a way to tell stories using Google Earth.

I've been working on the new feature for Google Earth 5.0 which makes it easy for you to record and share your stories with others. It's called Touring, and with it you can create guided, narrated flights around Google Earth. Think of it like a flying tour bus. Just like a tour bus, you can look around while you travel, you can have narration explaining what you're looking at, and you can get off the bus to wander around. Even better, you don't need roads and you never have to worry about being left behind!

So go ahead and try it out. Show off your favorite scuba-diving spots. Relive last summer's crazy road trip. Follow the development of your neighborhood by showing historical imagery. Impress the boss by sending him a tour of your project sites. You have complete control over the camera, the pacing, and more. Swoop through the Grand Canyon, open placemark balloons showing your vacation photos, flip through historical imagery, and watch the sun set over the ocean, all while narrating the story yourself, right in Google Earth.

Making Tours:
It's easy to record your own tour. Just press the "Record a Tour" button in the toolbar . This will bring up the tour recording controls in the 3D window.

1. Record/Stop button
2. Audio button
3. Current time in tour
4. Cancel tour recording button

Hit the record button to start recording, and navigate through Earth like you would normally. When you're finished, hit the record button again to stop recording and preview the tour that you just recorded. If you like what you see, click on the save button in the playback controls, and your tour will be saved to the left panel. You can click the right mouse button to email this tour to your friends.

Once you're comfortable with recording a simple tour, you'll want to try some more advanced features of the recorder. You can narrate your tour by clicking on the microphone button; you can also record the opening of balloons, and the toggling of visibility of features in your My Places panel. If you have the sunlight or historical imagery features active, then you can also record your movement back through time by dragging the time controls at the top of the screen. Remember, the tour won't turn on these features when it is replayed, so be sure they are on when you play them back. Just play around with the recorder a bit and you'll get the hang of it in no time.

You can also generate tours directly from KML content, such as folders of placemarks or paths. If you highlight a folder or a path in the left-panel, a "Create Tour" button will appear. When clicked, a tour will start playing. Click the save button in the playback controls to save your new tour to play back later. You can adjust tour creation settings in Preferences to get the exact pacing you like.

In a few minutes, you'll have some great tours to share with friends. Once you have a KML tour that you like, right-click on the tour in the left panel to email it to friends or to save it in a separate file. The KML file for the tour is usually quite small, so it's extremely quick to download and easy to email to friends and post on the web.

For more information, see the User guide for Touring in Google Earth 5.0 and the KML developer's guide for Touring.

Playing Tours:
To get started, load a tour KML and double-click on its entry in the places panel. You can tell tours apart from other KML features by the camera icon . When you play the tour, a set of playback controls will appear in the 3D view, letting you control the tour like a video. You can fast-forward, rewind, seek, etc.

1. Go back, play/pause and fast forward buttons
2. Tour slider
3. Current time in tour
4. Repeat button
5. Save tour button
6. Close tour button

Now, try looking around while you playing the tour. Use the mouse to move your view, or you can use the joystick in the upper-right corner. If you want to spend more time somewhere, just pause the tour. While it's paused, you can explore Google Earth just like normal. When you're ready to continue, unpause the tour and you'll continue the tour from where you left off. When you're done with the tour, close the tour controls.

Here are some good examples to get you started:

• Jimmy Buffett's Hawaii Tour
• History of Lake Tahoe Tour
• U.N.E.P Historical Imagery Tour

There are so many stories in this world that can be told in Google Earth. I hope you'll spend some time to record and share yours with Touring! Fly safe.

Posted by Dan Barcay, Software Engineer, Google Earth