Google Earth - Coolest. Toy. Evar.

Yes, yes. Crappy grammar/spelling/punctuation alert in the title. But....I have so much excitement to impart! For the last few days, much to my wife's (kiekre) chagrin, I have been playing with Google Earth. Formerly known as Keyhole, it is probably one of the largest free collections of satellite imagery data made available as a fully-interactive globe to manipulate and zoom to at your whim.

After an intense session of early-morning email volleyball with our work Support Team, I decided to unwind during lunch and try my hand at an Image Overlay. Basically, taking some sort of satellite data and lining it up based on its GPS coordinates on the virtual globe.

At first I tried to do a nice, detailed image of the massive phytoplankton bloom in the Baltic Sea but the image didn't match up well with the globe and I didn't have the lat/long coordinates. So I settled with a much easier image of low-oxygen areas in the north-central Gulf of Mexico.

I've also done a "tour" of Balad Air Base in Iraq where my brother Jon, (jdbryce) is due to be stationed later this month. That will come later.

Imagine if everyone "geocoded", (the process of putting GPS location information of where the picture was taken inside the picture's metadata), their photos they place on the Web or news organizations included GPS coordinates for the exact location of their stories in HTML pages. You could view the Web using this massive, interactive, realistic virtual Globe.

I strongly recommend those of you geo/semantic web/gadget geeks check out Google Earth along with some of the sites spring up around it: GoogleEarthHacks.com and Keyhole BBS.