The Google Blog released a story today by Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences about his web site Antweb. This web site would normally be of interest mostly to Entomologists, providing specifications and specimen photographs of those sometimes pesky little critters known to most as “ants”.
What is interesting is that Antweb has created a network link 
to access their georeferenced data for where specimens were collected in Google Earth. And, actually its kind of interesting to browse the numerous links around the world and click on a placemark to see if there is a picture. You then follow the link provided to the Antweb web page and you may see high-magnification specimen photos. Some of these ants look like they belong in an alien scifi horror movie.
This is definitely worth a download, but be forewarned. They have a huge number of placemarks and they download all of them for the entire world at once. It may cause your application to get slow for a minute while downloading and viewing placemarks. I would suggest they use a view-based query link to show just the placemarks for a smaller area of the world you are viewing. Still, this is an amazingly good application for use with Google Earth. Way to go bug guy!
Oh, and the bug guy was so glad to get help from Google with his project that he named an Ant after them: Proceratium google.
Network Links
UK Autumn Leaves Changing Colour
Now that leaves are changing colour in the UK, it’s a good time to write a story about this one. Rob Roy released a very cool network link which grabs the current leaf colour for different regions in the UK from a Forrestry web site and shows the leaf colour changes in Google Earth. Since it is a network link, all you have to do is save it in your “My Places” and turn it on and it will automatically check for changes and show you the current leaf colours. You can view his post where he announced his network link at the Google Earth Community.
Now, if only some people would write Autumn Color programs for the rest of the world. Rob Roy already told me he doesn’t have the time to do the US.
Rob Roy is also the maker of FlickrFly which lets you fly to where your georeferenced photograph in Flickr was taken into Google Earth.
Owners of Geocaching.com Stifle Innovation
This is the second time I’ve seen Geocaching.com owner’s Groundspeak stifle innovation and very useful enhancements. OgleEarth just wrote about this earlier today. Last month I wrote an article about Geocaching Google Earth showing a very powerful script written by Andy Fowler which allowed you to see Geocaches at the Geocaching.com web site from within Google Earth. You still had to link to Geocaching.com to see the useful data, it just made it MUCH easier to visualize where the caches are located by using GE. Here’s Andy Fowler’s views on what they have done, and I agree with him.
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Placeopedia Links Google Earth to WikiPedia
A new web site was announced last week which allows people to georeference WikiPedia articles. The Wikipedia is one of the grandest resources of information on the planet, created by the people for the people around the world (it’s available in at least 10 languages). The new web site is called Placeopedia. Placeopedia uses a slick Google Maps mashup interface to allow you to view “placemarks” of places linked to Wikipedia articles. Anyone can create a link (just like in WikiPedia, anyone can write or edit a story).
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Storm Tracking Tools – Hurricanes Rita/Phillipe
With the new Hurricane Phillipe in the Atlantic and Hurricane Rita threatening Florida and Cuba at the moment, this is a good time to introduce a new hurricane tracking link for Google Earth and a reminder of another one.
First check out this new Hurricane tracker which not only shows the tracks of current storms for the Atlantic, but for the whole world. One of the new features is that the storm links themselves include a list of satellite photos which appear when you click on them as shown in the picture shown here. This new tracker was done by someone known as ‘glooton’ from ‘La Faute sur Mer (France)’ in the Google Earth Community and was released in this post. It is a network link, so any updates he makes should be automatic. Save it in your ‘My Places’ folder. Nice job glooten!
You should also check out this other nice resource for following Atlantic tropical storms which I wrote about earlier. You also might want to read “All Atlantic Hurricanes 1851-Present“.