Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Tours

Mapping the Trayvon Martin murder case

The Trayvon Martin murder case was decided a few days ago, with the jury finding George Zimmerman “not guilty” of second-degree murder or manslaughter.  However, it remains a very hot topic as people debate the decision, Zimmerman’s actions, and the way that the “stand your ground” law is handled in Florida.

To help explain the series of events that occurred on the night of February 26, 2012, the folks at MyReadingMapped have developed a very comprehensive map that shows the location of each event that night.

trayvon

The map is very detailed, including locations and times of various activities, phone call details (some with audio), video clips and more.

You can view the map on their website, in Google Maps, or directly in Google Earth with this KML file.

The latest updates from Meograph

Our favorite “four-dimensional storytelling” site Meograph just posted a few great new updates:

  • Social photos: Import Facebook, Instagram, Flickr images (and do web image search) right within Meograph.
  • Improved design: Just got a whole lot more elegant, making stories look awesome.  Much easier on the eyes 🙂
  • Video preview: Check out video clips without having to leave editing

Here is a Meograph that takes advantage of some of the newest features:

You can try it out for yourself at Meograph.com. Have you created any cool stories on their site? Share your links to them in the comments below.

“Sailing Alone Around the World” in Google Earth

Colin Hazelhurst, who has built impressive tours such as Captain James Cook’s exploration of Australia, is back with an amazing collection of tours that show the voyage of Captain Joshua Slocum in his book “Sailing Alone Around the World“.

slocum

Captain Joshua Slocum is credited with making the first single-handed voyage around the world, departing from Boston in April, 1895 and arriving in Newport in June, 1898 after a journey of some forty-six thousand miles The animations presented on Colin’s site are organized by the chapters of Slocum’s book and within that into the significant passages that made up his voyage.

In addition to the impressive collection of narrated Google Earth tours that you can find on his website, Colin is also converting all of them into YouTube videos for easy viewing.  As an example, here is Chapter III Part 3: “At Fayal in the Azores”:

For more about this great collection of tours, you can follow Colin on Google+ or visit hazelhurst.com/Slocum to see all of the tours.

Great work Colin!

Meograph adds search features

We’ve been fans of Meograph since we first showed them you nearly a year ago.  In that time they’ve made a wealth of improvements, and the latest update is another great feature — search.

meograph-search

Users have created over 40,000 stories on their system, and now they have a good way to find the ones they’re looking for.  The search features include:

Meoscore: Scoring system that automatically ranks stories by quality/completeness, using number of moments, percent narrated, media included, etc.

Deep search: Because Meographs are saved as datasets on the backend, we can discover search terms in every subelement of the story in a way that no other media can.

Organization: Ability to sort by relevance, popularity, and recentness.

You can access this new feature at meograph.com/search.  If you’ve created an interesting meograph using their site, post a link to it in the comments so we can check it out!

Tracking the International Tour de Taiwan Ultra Marathon in Google Earth

A few days ago the 2013 Taiwan Ultra Marathon kicked off, a 14 day race that covers an astonishing 1100km. The runners are all carrying a Leadtek GPS device, and the organizers have put together this simple map to help track them.
However, Steven Ho (who has created tours such as this mountaineering trip and a neat tribute to Steve Jobs) wanted to be able to follow the race in Google Earth. Steven tried to get the organizers to produce a KML file of the runner’s data, but was unsuccessful. Instead, he built a handful of tours to help show off the race and included “rabbit” data to show the approximate location of the runners.

ultra-marathon.jpg

You can read more about Steven’s work on his blog and try it for yourself by clicking the image at the top of that page.
Along with that Google Earth Plugin integration, Steven has built a handful of KMZ files to help keep up with the event. You can use this KMZ to see a map of the course, this KMZ for a guided tour of the course, or this KMZ to see the current location of the rabbit.
Great work Steven!