As a pilot I have used GPS for navigation in my plane since 1998 (starting with a Garmin GPS195). During the last year, I discovered you can use tools to document your flight by saving your GPS flight log to your computer. One tool I found particularly nice is called GPS Visualizer (at www.gpsvisualizer.com). The picture at the right (click the picture to see larger) is an example of a flight I made shown in GPSVisualizer. The color of the track represents altitude.
I’ve shared GPSVisualizer’s capabilities with other pilots (oh, it’s also good for all kinds of other GPS activities by the way), but after seeing Google Earth I immediately wanted to try my flight tracks in it as well.
Navigation
Geotagged Flickr photos on the fly…
[EDIT – 10-Jan-2006: this network link is currently not working. The author who supported it recently went to work for Flickr and is migrating it to new servers at Yahoo (who own Flickr).]
This is truly an amazing feature of Google Earth. It’s all about the network link – a feature Google Earth has to allow a place you are viewing to tap into applications or data running on someone elses server on the Internet.
Imagine being able to find the photos anyone has taken near the place you are looking at in Google Earth. Imagine little icons of the photos appear magically at the coordinates where the photos were taken from within Google Earth. Now, follow this link 
to watch it happen right now! (NOTE: Turn this Place link on, then place yourself at a place of interest and wait 30 seconds or so. Little photo icons should start appearing if there are photos at Flickr near those coordinates. If not, try moving to a more popular location or zooming out a bit.)
You can click on the little photo icons and a pop-up cloud appears with a link “View at Flickr” which will let you see the full-sized photo.
The Network Link is the most power feature within Google Earth. There are already lots of interesting features being implemented using the network link and I predict there will be even cooler features coming out soon.
I found the Flickr 50 network link through this post at the Google Earth Community.