Google Earth Blog

Meograph launches interactive storytelling

August 28, 2013

We’ve mentioned Meograph and their “four-dimensional storytelling” a few times on the site, and they’re back again with more great features.

Today they’re announcing (PDF) the release of their interactive storytelling feature, bringing live Facebook profiles directly into multimedia content. From their release:

Now Facebook friend tagging is deeply integrated into Meograph’s creation and playback experience. In addition to creating stories out of video, audio, photos, text, and links, Meographers can add visual, clickable tags of Facebook friends. No other multimedia creation platform offers this type of engaging, socially viral product.

With this capability, organizations and their storytellers are able to incorporate live visual links to social profiles embedded right within their stories. The tagged friend is notified and gets a Facebook wall post that links to the story, an image from the content, and a list of the other people tagged. Letting people know they are part of a story being told massively increases virality of the content. This is timely as the age-old art of true, lasting storytelling adapts to the digital, social era.

It looks to be a smart new feature for the site, as the meographs created by users are typically social in nature, so connecting it with Facebook should be a great move. If you’ve not used their service before, head over to Meograph.com and give it a shot.

Walk through a Street View-powered corn maze

August 27, 2013

Earlier this year we showed you a collection of corn mazes that were viewable in Google Earth, but none of them allowed you to actually explore them via Street View.

Thanks to Kyle Giesbrecht of Edmonton Business Photos, that has finally changed!

Head over to this link to see it for yourself in Google Maps and try to work your way through the maze.

Great work, Kyle!

50 years since the March on Washington

August 27, 2013

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, so I thought it’d be a good opportunity to look at various MLK-related items we’ve seen in Google Earth over the years.

First, we have this excellent auto-playing Google Map tour of Dr. King’s life created by Virender Ajmani.

Next we have this collection of sites posted by ‘Zardoz50’ in the Google Earth Community. It’s a relatively small collection of placemarks, but they’re quite useful with the addition of 3D Imagery in the area.

Lastly we have Peter Olsen’s 3D sculpture of the Martin Luther National Memorial in Washington, D.C. It’s an amazing model, and includes some measurement inaccuracies that most of us would have missed.

Tracking the Rim Fire in Google Earth

August 26, 2013

The “Rim Fire” in the western United States has expanded greatly after hitting Yosemite National Park, spreading in a massive blaze of over 125,000 acres.

InciWeb has some amazing maps of the fire, including a detailed look at the current perimeter of it:

While the size of the fire is clearly the biggest concern, the quantity of smoke generated by the fire is staggering. To illustrate that, the NASA Earth Observatory has released an image that was taken on August 22 which clearly shows the scale of the smoke. You can view that image in Google Earth by using this KML file.

For the latest geo-related info on the fire, the InciWeb page seems to be your best bet. If you know of other great resources, please leave a comment and let us know.

Burning Man 2013

August 25, 2013

We’ve discussed the famous Burning Man event quite a few times in the past (2011, 2010, 2007, 2006) as Google often features aerial imagery from the event in Google Earth. In fact, by using the historical imagery feature in the Black Rock, NV area you can find imagery from many of their events over the past few years.

This year’s festival begins tomorrow and Google has gone even further and created a detailed map of every street at the event. The roads are viewable in Google Earth, but are easier to use in Google Maps in this case.

You can see it for yourself in this map on Google Maps, or read more on Google Maps Mania.