I was pretty intrigued by Photosynth when it was first introduced to the public in Auguast, 2008, but I admit to being a fan of Google Earth over Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

There’s always room for an interesting new twist, however, and today Microsoft announced the integration of Photosynth with Virtual Earth.  The foks at TechCrunch are lauding the step.

By using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology it is possible for users to port their Photosynths to Virtual Earth, running on both Macs and PCs.  The company suggests the combo is a must for tourism agencies as well as businesses who want to add a “cool visual layer” to their stores, outlets and offices.  The example they provide (one image below) is of a house for sale.

The latest release of Photosynth introduces commercial licensing, privacy controls, and one-click highlighting for viewers to easily explore synths.  TechCrunch points out that getting users to install and use both Virtual Earth and Silverlight will be a challenge.  So far they have eluded the mainstream.

Google Earth’s latest update – 5.0 — offers a number of reasons to download it.  Whether you want to explore the oceans, Mars, or 3D views of Vancouver, or New York City, you are in for a treat.

Wired Blog Network says the “most exciting of the new features are the oceanography details. Google Earth has long offered minor, 2D topographical sketches of the Earth’s oceans, but the latest version adds the sort of details that Jacques Cousteau would have flipped for — you can now dive under the ocean and fly over undersea landmarks — mountains, trenches, shipwrecks and more.”  The post shows some impressive screen shots, or you can find your own once you install the GE 5.

On the other hand, Google Earth Blog poster Frank Taylor says that one of his favorite new major features is the new Mars mode. The feature isn’t obvious when you first open Google Earth 5 — after loading look for the little planet icon at the top center of the view. Click on it and you will see a menu.  You now can switch between Earth, Sky, AND Mars.  This is not just an image overlay on top of Earth, he points out, it is a complete simulation of the planet Mars just like Google Earth.  You use the same controls, and there is a set of very useful layers just like in Google Earth

The Google Earth Blog is a good place to find links to all the new features (including new historical imagery) of GE 5 beta.

Yesterday Google launched the Prado layer in Google Earth allowing you to explore highly detailed photographic images of fourteen of the Prado Museum’s masterpieces, reported Google Lat Long Blog.

The Prado Museum is the first art gallery to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth, allowing art historians, students and tourists to zoom in online and explore the works in fine detail because of the very high resolution photos.  Let’s hope this starts a trend.

The Google Earth Prado layer also includes 3D models which allow you to fly around the Prado buildings to experience the museum as if you were actually there.

To enjoy the Prado, open Google Earth (you can download it here if you don’t have it), check the 3D buildings layer on the bottom left panel, type in Prado in the “fly to” search box, and access the masterpieces.

You can also view the Prado in Google Maps.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has announced the December 19th auction of more than 50,000 acres of oil and gas parcels alongside or within view of Arches National Park and two other red-rock national parks in Utah, according to the Seattle P-I.

The National Park Service’s top official in the state calls it “shocking and disturbing.”

The BLM can’t figure out what all the fuss is about.  BLM state director Selma Sierra was defiant, saying she saw nothing wrong with drilling near national parks.  “I don’t see it as something we are doing to undermine the Park Service.”

Conservation groups dispute that, saying never before has the bureau bunched drilling parcels on the fence lines of national parks.

“This is the fire sale, the Bush administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry,” said Stephen Bloch, a staff attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.  “These are the crown jewels of America’s lands that the BLM is offering to the highest bidder,” he said.

An examination of the parcels, superimposing low-resolution government graphics onto Google Earth maps, shows that in one case, drilling parcels bordering Arches National Park are 1.3 miles from Delicate Arch.

“If you’re standing at Delicate Arch, like thousands of people do every year, and you’re looking through the arch, you could see drill pads on the hillside behind it.  That’s how ridiculous this proposed lease sale is,” said Franklin Seal, a spokesman for the environmental group Wildland CPR.

In all, the BLM is moving to open 359,000 more acres in Utah to drilling.

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.