Google Earth Hacks blog

We’ve just launched our new YouTube channel and we encourage you to go check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleEarthHacks

There are three videos up so far:

• TV and Movie Locations in Google Earth — A variety of locations of popular TV show and movie sets.
• Marvão, Portugal in 3D - A brief flyover of the beautiful new 3D models in Marvão.
• Various Hearts found in Google Earth - Showing a variety of heart-shaped objects in Google Earth, inspired by the latest issue of “The Sightseer”.

We’re open to your suggestions for future videos.  If you have any ideas, just post a thread in our Site Issues and Questions forum and we’ll talk about it with you.  Thanks!

Our 10 millionth file download will happen in the next few weeks, and 3DConnexion has given us a few more SpaceNavigators to help celebrate!

The two people with the closest guesses to the exact date/time of the 10 millionth download win.  It’s that easy!

More details can be found here, and you can enter here.  Good luck!

We’re proud to announce the launch of YourMap, a tool to make embedding a Google Map as easy as possible.

By filling out a simple form, code is generated that you can put on your site.  The code is platform independent, meaning it will work with almost any hosting provider.

Along with showing the map of your location, this program will also generate a Google Earth KML for your users.

Go check out the demo map, see a list of other sites already using YourMap, or try it yourself!

We’re always looking for ways to improve GEH, so we’re opening it up to you.  What features would you like to see us change/add?

This can be little things (”change the order of the files on xx page…”) or big things.  Post in the comments below or shoot me an e-mail.  Thanks!

Here’s a fun new feature that people have been asking for — collections!

Some users wanted a way to tag files as “favorites”, then share that list with others.  This takes that idea but goes one step further.  You can create a favorites list, but you can create other lists as well.  I’ve built a few to get you started.

• Georgia Drought - Some files related to the drought in the southeast US.
• Mickey’s Favorite Files - A few of my favorite files.

To add files to a collection, just browse to the very bottom of the page when viewing an individual file.  If you’re logged in, you’ll see a drop-down box to add that file to one of your collections.  That’s it!

It’s a pretty simple feature, but could make for some neat collections.  If you have suggestions on how best to organize the list of collections as it gets bigger, leave a note in the comments below.

Nickvet419!  Nicholas posted well over 100 times in GEboards, and his thread titled “Dow Diamond” (home of the semi-professional baseball team the Great Lakes Loons) was the winner.  The random location was in southern Canada, about 80 miles NNE of the Mackinac Bridge.  Details on the exact location can be found in the official contest thread.

Thanks to all who posted in GEboards in an effort to try to win the prize, and congratulations once again to Nicholas!  We hope you enjoy your new SpaceNavigator!

Mickey

Only two days left in our contest to win a SpaceNavigator.

As we’ve said before, the mystery location is in one of the 50 largest countries in the world.  Now we’ll give two more small clues:

1 - It’s not particularly close to a major city.  Remember, we choice this point completely at random, and it happened to fall in a major country but not too close to a major city.

2 - The current leader is about 300 miles away, so there is a LOT of land in the area around the winning point.

Post a lot of new threads in GEboards and you might be the winner.

Mickey

If you haven’t heard elsewhere yet, we’ve just launched GEboards, a message board that is completely contained in Google Earth.

Using the Flash capabilities of the newest release of Google Earth (version 4.2, Windows only), we’ve been able to finally build this product.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Thanks,
Mickey

Since we launched Google Earth Football a few weeks ago, over 1,000 games have been played!  So far, Spider is leading the pack with a 17-10 record, with a few players (including myself) closing in on him.  Can you catch him?

We’ve made a few additions to our forum. We rearranged a few things to help clean it up and then added The Lounge - a place talk about anything except Google Earth.

Also, we added a nifty ajax spy to the forums. You’ve probably seen a similar page on other sites - it’s simply a running list of the newest posts in there. It’s kinda neat during the busy parts of the day.

If you have any other suggestions for the forums (or the site in general), please let us know.

Update: In the future, the spy can be accessed via the “quick links” menu at the top of the forums.