The City of Portland has added a slick new addition to their GIS information which I wrote about earlier. This new capability shows building property outlines as transparent 3D polygons as well as the parcel/property outline. Make sure you use the tilt capability to see this best. You can move your view around to other parts of the city and it will automatically load another area of the city. It can’t load too large of an area at once as it will be too much information. Download the file here 
to see it in action.
This is really slick stuff, and other cities should be paying attention to the City of Portland, which is leading the way in showing how GIS information can be put into the hands of the world (literally). My hat is off to the GIS team at the City of Portland! Here is the City of Portland’s post which includes details about how they are doing this.
Applications
Real Estate Done Google Earth Style
Earlier this month an excellent application of Google Earth for real estate was released at coloradofuture.com (use their interface to search for houses, then select the Google Earth listings). These guys have taken their house listings and put them into Google Earth so you can look around their region of Colorado and find houses within your price range, look at the property within GE, or look for detailed information on the listing at their web site.
Google Earth is obviously a powerful potential tool for learning more about an area surrounding some real estate you are interested in. You can check for nearby things like grocery stores, malls, railroad tracks, and ATMs. You can look for hazards such as trash dumps, flood plains, and unwanted commercial buildings or traffic. And, as more cities include access to their GIS data (like the City of Portland), you will have even more powerful data to access within GE.
Significantly, the Google Earth team claims they have already had numerous people contact them that they had purchased buildings based on the input they gathered from Google Earth.
This real estate application was announced in this post at the GE Community BBS. Already, another real estate listing was mentioned in the thread as available in Florida.
Slick Videos of Google Earth
Some excellent work by leanbackvids.com give you a chance to see Google Earth in video without having to install the application. Could be useful if you want to show someone who isn’t likely to install the application itself. But, they are worth a view regardless. Any Google Earth user can’t help but smile at these.
The first one is called “Wonderful World” (Quicktime required) and shows the perfect potential use of Google Earth to see videos tied to location. This shows the power of Google Earth and tying it to data all over the world, and is made perfect by a great choice of music. By the way, the guys at vlogmap.org have already created a way to view video log locations in Google Earth (the videos themselves are viewed in your browser). Note: the Wonderful World shows videos within Google Earth and is, as far as I know, a video trick. You can’t view videos as icons within Google Earth like this – yet. 🙂
The second video is called “Mirror World” (Quicktime required) and is a video of a tour of Seattle using Google Earth to do the tour and real video used to show more details. They have cleverly matched exact angle/views within Google Earth to dissolve into the real video. Very nice!
These videos were brought to my attention by Matt Savarino at vlogmap.org.
New Beta Version of Google Earth
Speaking of Ogle, I just found out that there’s a new beta version of Google Earth available when you download Google Earth called version 3.0.0529. One new feature allows you to share a Placemark with the Google Earth Community, and I assume ultimately with the BBS Layer. I’m not sure this is a good idea, because the layer is already getting cluttered (see this story). Not only that, but this new version of GE uses Internet Explorer to execute the post (even if another browser is your default) – Bad Google!
[Edit: 11:45AM] Google has already responded that I have found a bug with the external browser use and they’ll fix it. Also, they say they are working on the duplicate placemark problem. Also, they are just getting ready to release this version to the “Check for Updates” option in GE.
ABC Primetime Uses Google Earth
Last night ABC Primetime used Google Earth in a story about 911 services using location technology for cell phone users. They apparently zoomed in on New York and gave credit to Google Earth in the upper right corner.
This is just one of many examples of news organizations using this technology both on TV programming as well as in their online news media. Google Earth is a great interactive visualization tool, and more people are realizing it every day.
(Thanks Christine!)