Thirty-seven new locations have been added to Google Maps Street View as the service celebrates its first birthday.  They have also expanded coverage in 15 existing areas.

New cities are listed below, and below that, 10 additional parks and recreational areas.

• MA: Springfield
• NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
• NJ: Newark
• VA: Virginia Beach
• NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
• SC: Columbia, Greenville
• GA: Atlanta
• FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
• AL: Huntsville
• MS: Jackson
• TN: Knoxville
• KY: Lexington, Louisville
• OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
• MI: Ann Arbor
• MO: St. Louis
• KS: Topeka
• NE: Lincoln
• OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
• NV: Reno
• CA: Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton

New parks and recreational areas:

• Everglades National Park (Florida)
• Florida Keys
• Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
• Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana)
• Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
• Joshua Tree National Park (California)
• Death Valley National Park (California)
• Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
• Sequoia National Park (California)
• Lake Tahoe (California/Nevada)

 Street View can be seen in both Google Maps and Google Earth.

Trip planning tips with Google Maps
Have you checked out ways to use Google Maps to make travel planning easy and fun?  Before you head out the door for your summer vacation trip, search for hotels, restaurants, check reviews, and use street-level imagery. 

Want to know about weather, parks, gas stations?  Want to know what the area looks like?  Check out photos, videos, and turn on the Panoramio photo layer to see photos others have taken.  Later you can add your own photos and videos to “my maps” and share with friends.

The tip site includes a brief video.  

Have a “look around” with Panoramio
If you are not familiar with Panoramio, Google’s site for sharing geo-tagged photos, now is a good time to become aware of it.  Panoramio lets photographers geo-locate, store and organize their photographs and view them in their geographic context.

I’ve enjoyed viewing these photos as I explored locations on Google Earth and Google Maps, but now if you visit the Panoramio site itself, places with a lot of photos (typically the big tourist sites) can give you a “look around.” 

Select a locale and then a photo — in this example the Ponte Vecchio in beautiful Florence, Italy — look for and click on the “look around” link. 

In the image below, I have already selected an alternate view of the bridge.  You just need to mouse over a photo to see what slice of the original is represented in the displayed thumbnails which you can click on to “look around.”  You can move all around the area, left or right, closer or farther away, day or night, depending on the photos available.  Enjoy your arm-chair travel!

The new browser plug-in for Google Earth “brings the full power of Google Earth to the web, embeddable within your own web site,” says Google Lat Long blog.  Instead of the Google Earth application, you need only install a plug-in that works in Firefox and Internet Explorer 6/7 on Windows.

Google also launched a JavaScript API that lets you interact with the globe and integrate with Google Maps.  The extensive API  allows you to control the camera, create lines, markers and plygons, import 3D models from the web, overlay your content on the planet or in the in the galaxies by toggling Sky mode.

The Google Earth Browser Plugin can be downloaded here.   Before downloading the plugin, says Google Operating System blog, be aware that Google installs it in Firefox and Internet Explorer, along with a system service called “Google Update Service.”  The plug-in uses a lot of memory (around 100 MB just for loading the initial view) and, for each embedded object, you’re running an instance of the Google Earth application.

The latest layer for Google Earth shows Google News stories related to a particular location, says Google Operating System blog. 

“The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser.  By spatially locating the Google News’ constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide.  Zoom into areas of personal interest and peruse headlines of national, regional and, when fully zoomed in, even the most local of interest,” says Brandon Badger, Product Manager of Google’s Geo team.

After you open Google Earth, go to the layers sidebar and look for “Google News” in the Gallery.  Select it and zoom in on a location of interest.

Another way to get local news is in your browser.  Add a local section to the personalized Google News homepage.  “Adding a Local News section allows you to track news stories from and about a particular city or region.  While this function is currently only available in our English language editions, we hope to add more languages and regions in the near future,” explains the Google News help center.

A posting today on Lat Long Blog announces that the British Government is launching with Google Earth Outreach, and in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey, new layers in Google Earth that utilize geographical information to show how climate change will affect our planet and its people.

Climate Change in Our World and Climate Change in Our World, Antarctica are two KML files featured on Google Earth Outreach that offer a “unique distillation of informed, scientific and geographically-organized information demonstrating the commitment by the British Government to continue to carry out this important climate research and to communicate the results of the research by making this information readily accessible.”

Climate Change in Our World is by the Met Office UK and you can also make it show in Google Maps, notes Google Blogoscoped.  The layer clearly shows scientific and economic evidence that “climate change is happening and it is probably the greatest single challenge facing the world today.”

As we have seen, many communites around the world, particularly the poor and vulnerable, suffer greatly from weather-related disasters, and the scientific consensus is that the effects of climate change will continue to increase.

Microsoft has released visualization software called WorldWide Telescope (WWT), that “enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.” 

It is primarily an educational tool.  You see the same images that scientists at NASA use for their research or perform your own research with those images.  You can see the Earth from the same perspective that astronauts see as they descend to Earth.

“WWT is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience.  Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface.”

Once you have downloaded the software — which only runs on Windows XP or Vista (on both PCs and Macs), you can search the large database for existing images and tours created by experts, or use the images to create your own slide-based show.

It will be interesting to see how WWT competes Google Sky which is viewable in Google Earth or in a standard web browser.

Here are the download instructions and specs for PCs or Macs.  Once you have downloaded the software, take a tour.

The Website also includes instructions on how you can create your own slide-based tour. 

Now there are 120 maps in the Rumsey Historical Map layer in Gallery layer in Google Earth, and these maps can now be seen in a new layer in Google Maps.  They were posted by David Rumsey, founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection.

There have been improvements in finding and enabling the maps as well.  All are now represented by icons on the earth which open balloons that allow you to display the historical map on Google Earth and get more information.

The new historical maps include a 1792 Celestial Globe, the first accurate survey of Yosemite Valley, California, from 1883, new maps of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Washington DC, Denver, Chicago, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Calcutta, Lima, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Beijing, Tokyo, Kyoto, and more – all from times ranging from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

A Keyhole Markup Language file has been created to view National Wetlands Data with the free application, Google Earth.  You will need Google Earth version 4.2, or higher, to run this file. 

To ensure that you use the latest version, says U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wetlands Inventory,  it is recommended that you always load the file and open Google Earth by selecting this link:  WetlandsData.KMZ.  When prompted, save the link.

If Google Earth doesn’t launch automatically, you can first launch Google Earth and then select the menu option File, Open, locate the previously downloaded file (WetlandsData.KMZ), then click the Open button.

Here are some ways to use the wetlands information:

• Double click any layer title to zoom into its area
• Click on any layer checkbox to view or hide the image layer
• Click on any legend checkbox to view or hide it
• The Lower 48 States Wetland Scans layer is hidden by default. To view the image layer, first zoom into an area that has Wetland Scans information, then turn on the layer.
• If two versions of Google Earth are currently installed on your computer, it is recommended that the oldest version (and its associated desktop icon) is removed  from your computer.
• To remove the Wetlands Data file from Google Earth, right-click on the FWS Wetlands Data folder located under Places (Google Earth left panel), then select Delete.

You might want to take a look at the Google Earth Fact Sheet (PDF)  [via Resource Shelf] 

The availabiity of Google Earth 4.3 is all over the blogosphere and rightly so.  There are some great new features, a lot of interface changes, and a redesigned navigation control that lets you change the perspective much faster.  You can use the joystick to rotate your view, look around from a single vantage point, zoom in and out, and more.  Check out Google Operating System blog for instructions on getting the most out of the new navigation tool.

You can also now fly down to Street View as you can with Google Maps in the places where it is available (check Street View under Layers).  As you approach your target city, look for the camera icons to click on to get the approximate street address and then move in to view the location.

You can watch a time lapse view of sunrise to sunset by clicking on the sun button in the tool bar and pushing the play arrow.  Find some really spectacular Google Earth scenery and try this out!

Improvements have been made to 3D building capabilities.  “Google has optimized the loading and performance of 3D buildings. When you first turn on the 3D Buildings layer near a city with models, you’ll see simplistic versions of the buildings load up really fast, then they gradually get more solid and load more texture detail,” explains the unofficial Google Earth Blog.

Google Earth Blog has some excellent videos showing the new features of version 4.3 and navigation tool.

Shareable iGoogle gadgets
iGoogle has added more shareable gadgets.  ToDo, Sticky Note, NoteKeeper and more.

Save Google Presentations to PowerPoint
Google Operating System blog announced that now you can save Google Presentations as PowerPoint files. 

More features are expected to be available soon, such as inserting tables, adding YouTube videos, and viewing presentations offline.

Google Earth and Australian architecture
Want a tour of Australian architecture without leaving home?  The Royal Australia Institute of Architects (RAIA) has developed a layer for Google Earth. 

Addiitonal information can be found on the Official Google Australia Blog.