As written at OgleEarth, Google Earth was used by an Italian systems analyst named Luca Mori to discover a Roman Villa. Apparently he noticed an anomaly near his village of Sorbola and called in some professional archeologists who took a look and discovered a previously undiscovered Roman villa. Read the story at OgleEarth here. Luca’s story was picked up in an Italian TV news story.
Google Earth use definitely goes beyond casual sightseeing and for finding directions. It’s a very versatile tool and I’m sure many other scientific discoveries will be made using it for visualization purposes.
UPDATE: It turns out that because I can’t read Italian very well that the true story is apparently he used Google Maps initially to make the discovery, but that he could view the site “particularly well with Google Earth”.
Google Earth News
Minor Update to Google Earth Beta 5
A new version of Google Earth is out. It is a minor bug fix update to version .0548. See the details on the fixes in the post at the forums here.
News Coverage on Google Earth and Hurricane Help
The New York Times has written an article (you can see it at CNET here or at the New York Times) which talks about the way the Google Earth forums has responded with these images and helped hurricane victims and potential victims check on the damaged areas in Google Earth. Here’s another story by Forbes. And here’s a story by the BBC on the topic.
A woman named Kathryn Cramer has dedicated her time during the past week to helping hurricane victims with information using Google Earth and her blog. She’s is mentioned in the above stories. She has posted links to several stories around the world she’s heard about on these topics here.
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.