In a telling display of Google's new unified product approach, the Google Earth annoucement encourages users to "upgrade to Google+." Google wants to be considered all one service, and a Google+ "upgrade" spans across all its sites and applications.

Download Google Earth 6.2 here.

What do you think of Google integrating all its services? Sound off in the comments.

Now imagine that such a thing didn't just exist, wasn't just a plaything for Kings and the wizards in their courts, but had been downloaded over tiny wires and through the air one billion times around the world. That's exactly what has happened now that Google Earth has been downloaded 1 billion times.

Thousands of geoglyph "wheels," almost completely unknown to the public, are now part of public knowledge thanks to advances in technology, both photographic and social. These wheels are scattered across the deserts of Jordan and adjacent countries.

Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia has been using Google Earth and aerial photography to study the structures, which were first reported in 1927 by British Royal Air Force fliers who were making mail runs over the area.

According to CBS News:

"(T)hese stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across."

"(W)heels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

You can look at a gallery of the wheels on LiveScience and a much larger gallery of related structures on Flickr.

Other sources: A Blog About History | photos via LiveScience from Flickr : Image 1: Copyright APAAME_20090928_RHB-0120, Photographed by Robert H. Bewley; Image 2: Drawn by Stafford Smith, APAAME; Image 3: Copyright APAAME_20080925_DLK-0308, Photographed by David L. Kennedy

The update for Honeycomb adds support for fully textured 3D buildings and an action bar on top of the app for easier search. It will also allow users to "fly to your location" and adds Google Maps layer-like functionality to integrate Google Places, Panoramio photos and Wikipedia notations.

The update is intended for Android tablets but is also available for any Android 2.1 (Éclair) devices and above. We tested it on a Samsung Galaxy S Captivate and found that the "fly to" function is quite amusing. The layers of Wikipedia entries, Panoramio and Places could make for an interesting tour guide wandering around a city. Imagine a very sophisticated version of the application "It Happened Here" that is integrated with Google Earth instead of Google Maps (the way it is now). It does not provide quite the deep historical context that It Happened Here does but Wikipedia entries often provide useful facts about a location's history.

On the smartphone, the layers show up in a different window away from the 3D picture you are looking at. On the tablet version the pictures, Wikipedia and Places pop up in the main window without losing the view of the location you are looking at.

It is a solid update to Google Earth. As Google attempts to flesh out the world of Honeycomb-specific applications, it needs to be able to take the lead and release its own build of applications. Google apps optimized by the company itself can make a big difference in whether consumers want to buy and Android tablet.

Archaeologists have been adding web and mobile technologies to their toolkit for a while now. But this discovery is surprising just in the scope of it. And it indicates the possibility that we are verging on a new archaeological golden age.

Of those finds, 1,082 seem to be "pendants," the distinctive tear drop-shaped, stone tombs of ancient Arabia.

He published his account of these finds and of his method in the Journal of Archaeological Sciences.

Since 2007, Google Earth has delivered "2.5 meter resolution imagery taken from the SPOT 5 satellite."

Other archaeological and anthropological finds in the last year that have used new technology include identifying a major Mesoamerican city as it transitioned to empire using GPS and mobile handhelds; mapping another large city in the area using lidar; identifying 2,000 year-old Roman medicines using a database of digitized ancient medical texts; and using Google Earth to identify anthropological site that yielded a heretofore unknown human ancestor.

The notion that Google Earth and other tools will eventually see archaeologists doing all their work from their home offices is just dumb. What it means is that exploratory digs will be much more likely to produce important work since the number of targets is so much higher and more can be known about them prior to finding personnel, time and money to do the unavoidable, hand-on digging that will always be a part of the discipline.

Other sources: A Blog About History

The WikiLeaks saga of the last two weeks has been illustrative, if nothing else, of the importance of the decentralization of the Internet in relation to the freedom of information. An attempt to stifle a voice in one location simply leads to that voice springing from another, like a leak from a rusted pipe or a Whac-A-Mole arcade game. 

WikiLeaks currently has well over 1,000 mirrors, which host the same data in different locations in case the parent site is taken down, and one Harvard developer has gathered all of these mirrors into a Google Earth visualization to show from whence these leaks have sprung. 

In order to create the visualization, Laurence Muller wrote a PHP script to scrape the primary list of WikiLeaks mirrors on the WikiLeaks site. He found 1,334 URLs and used GeoLite City to resolve each of them to a relatively specific (city-wide) geospatial location. Finally, he converted the list of related URLs, IP addresses and longitude/latitude coordinates into KML format for use with Google Earth. The result is a series of pins on a 3D globe showing all of the locations, globally, where WikiLeaks data is being mirrored.

Taking a quick look at the data, you can see that many of the mirrors are located throughout Europe, though they can be found as far and wide as South America, North America, Asia and Africa. They are  all over the globe.

Earlier this week, Marshall Kirkpatrick took a similar look at how WikiLeaks' data spread though decentralized, peer-to-peer networks, such as on the bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. He came up with a great bunch of stats that show just how difficult it can be to stifle the spread of information with tools like bittorent and dedicated mirror sites. This same sort of map for bittorent seeds would likely show an even greater global distribution.

If you have installed the Google Earth Plug-In you can take a look for yourself at the mapped out data. And if you're even more of a geo-location geek, Muller has made the data available for download on his blog.

Google Earth provides a wealth of computer-generated building models, but Google notes that trees have been "rather hard to come by." In the service of boosting the realism substantially of the 3D world substantially, today's Google Earth release includes models for dozens of species of trees. Google says it's already "planted" over 80 million trees in Google Earth.

Street View isn't a new feature for Google Earth. It's been available since 2008. But the experience is now fully integrated, so you can zoom from the outer space view of Earth smoothly and seamlessly to your doorstep. Simply drag Pegman, the Street View mascot, onto any place where you see a blue highlighted road, an indication that Street View is available. And from there you can use the navigation controls to move around.

Like Street View, the availability of historical imagery via Google Earth isn't entirely new. But this release makes these images far easier to find. When you fly to an area where images are available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar. Clicking on it will transport you to that view, and you can browse through other images for that location.

Google announced back in April that it would begin offering the ocean view as a default, after it had started mapping the ocean a year earlier.

"With the release of this feature, you can escape the hustle and bustle of life on land and discover the marine world using Google Earth on your mobile device. For example, check out the landscape and terrain in Monterery Bay Canyon, which is larger than the Grand Canyon, by zooming in on Google Earth below the ocean surface just off the coast. Once underwater, you can use the 'look around' button to tilt the view and see the extent of this great undersea canyon."

The latest release of Google Earth for Android also adds the "Explore the Ocean" layer with submissions by more than 100 partners such as National Geographic, the National Geographic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as well as the Mission Blue Foundation.

According to the Lat Long blog, there are also new features available for Android 2.2. users, such as the ability to play Flash videos "right in the balloon" and use two fingers to navigate the virtual replica of the Earth.

Google Earth for Android 1.1 is available for download in the Android marketplace.

Just added to the latest version of Google Earth, the feature offers a live view of the weather, from radar to raindrops.

On a macro level, the weather layers offer a way to get a bird's eye view of weather events like hurricanes. When you zoom in, Google takes it one step further and offers an animated view of the rain or snow for that area. The precipitation data currently only covers some areas in North America and Europe

The added layer is available in the latest version of Google Earth, which was released in early June with enhanced functionality for both free and pro users.

The site lets you track everything from daily spill positions to the locations of ships responding to the crisis. State and non-governmental organizations are also collecting and mapping real-time information. In some instances the efforts include citizen-generated data from iPhone apps and photos mapped on sites like Flickr.

LA Earth (Louisiana Earth) is a Google Earth Enterprise Server operated by the state of Louisiana that provides daily oil spill trajectories, closures, and many other maps as a Google Earth layer (kml). (Download the Google Earth Client/Plugin to use the date.)

Crisis and Crowd-sourced Mapping

There are several ways that that Gulf locals are mapping and reporting spill related incidents. The Oil Spill Crisis map was created buy the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and students at Tulane University. The map shows hundreds of reports sent through SMS messages, Twitter and the Internet. The map was built using open-source crisis mapping software developed by Ushahidi.

The sensors built into smartphones are collecting a rich stream of spill-related data for mapping. The iPhone app Oil Spill Response (iTunes download) allows you to file mobile reports on wildlife, oiled shorelines and other types of spill-related damage. Oil Reporter was created by Crisis Commons and is available for both iPhones and Android smart-phones. It geotags photos, files reports, and provides information on how to contact authorities or volunteer.

Beyond the information collected by the government and oil industry, people are documenting their own stories. Communities are forming on photo sharing sites like Flickr where location-tagged images can be visualized using Flickr Map.

Built by a French company called Newscape, as a demonstration of its technology that allows mobile devices to process large quantities of data, Mobile 3D City appeared on our radar today via a video posted to design blog PSFK.

It appears that this app will cover just one city, and it certainly is a far cry from where Google Earth is today, but can you imagine if this kind of 3D experience was part of what Google's global ball of zooming, spinning and Wikipedia entries offered in the future? That would be pretty cool. It would likely take some serious, serious technology to be possible though. Thus the technology demonstration.

The Google Earth Blog (different from the official Google LatLong blog) traced the development of Google Earth as an anti-looting tool.

He published his findings in an article in Antiquity.

If the Web world has democratized publishing to some degree, it seems likely that other areas of human investigation, such as archaeology, are starting to also see the effects of easy, or easier, access to information. Humans can be operatically stupid, but we can also be awfully intelligent and insightful. The right tools, for less money, give more people a chance to see things others haven't. Contreras has seen the use of Google Earth as a way to survey and track looting. Catching a looter in the act is unlikely until and unless Earth goes real-time. But keeping track and produce information that in turn can create public policy regarding our intellectual and physical patrimony.

"The technology is all there," Contreras told Archaeology's Pringle. "It's just a question of how to administer it. And I think this would make people a little more aware of the problem of looting, as well as providing a tangible source of documentation for archaeologists."

Archaeologist Anthony Beck cautions against thinking of Google Earth as a researcher's cure-all. Free data, he says, comes at a price.

"(T)he user does not get direct access to the raw data in the viewer. This is generally important for an image interpreter as it allows them to enhance the image to provide improved interpretation. Instead, a generalised product is streamed that has been compressed using a wavelet technique. This compression technique significantly reduces file size at the expense of spatial and spectral definition."

In terms of popularizing the problem, though, and influencing public policy, Google Earth may well have a role to play. Mention Google Earth to anyone likely to be interested in the preservation of human legacy on the planet and they'll probably know what you're talking about, and more to the point, be able to look at the same data you did in the same way. Talk about World Wind Landsat or Ikonos MS and you're likely to lose all but the pros. And the pros don't set public policy, not without the plebes.

That list may be on the verge of growing exponentially. Last Thursday, the New York Times reported, 30 U.S. states' attorneys general held a conference call to decide whether they should join together to launch a comprehensive, shared investigation of Google.

A request for comment was sent to a Google spokesperson and to one of AG Blumenthal's press officers. If we receive responses from either, we will post it here.

Playing around with the new application, it's almost as if Google Earth was originally designed for the iPad, but had to limit itself to desktop computers and tiny mobile screens until now. Yes, it's just that good.

But for some reason, this native iPad app recaptures the feeling of amazement and wonder which I honestly haven't felt since the app's launch, way back in 2005. (How soon we become jaded.)

Falling in Love with Google Earth Again

At the time, I worked in I.T. for a small business and was surprised to find some users at the branch locations had managed to install the Google Earth application on the locked-down kiosk-style computers out on the showroom floor. (Google Earth was sneaky and installed itself to user profiles, even though users had no permission to install applications themselves. A tricky workaround on Google's part.)

Although I was inevitably tasked with removing the app from the public computers, I couldn't help but spend a few minutes in awe as the entire staff gathered around the screen to search for this person's house, that person's hometown and so on. It was, in a word, fascinating. And who could blame them? This was incredible technology. It almost saddened me to take it away from them, knowing that for some of these people, the work computer was their only outlet for reaching the Web and the applications it held.

But unfortunately that's how things went in the world of '05 I.T. Computers were tools, not toys. And definitely not the hybrid work/life devices of today.

At home, though, Google Earth was a joy. For awhile, that is...until eventually, over time, those early feelings of excitement for globe-spinning geolocation application wore off and Google Earth was just Google Earth, the clunky desktop app which sat lonely and un-launched until it was eventually uninstalled.

A few years later, it came to the iPhone, and we easily dubbed it a "winner" in our review. Yet it was nothing like this. Google Earth was made for the iPad, it just didn't exist until now. We never knew what we were missing.

You can download Google Earth for iPad yourself here.

Adding GPS data to Google Earth is a fun and handy tool for individual users, but the real benefit is to the greater crowd of Google Earth fans. By collecting user data from hikes, bike rides, walks, runs or any other outdoor activity, Google will be able to create better maps that feature paths for these types of activities. If Google knows which way is most popular to get from Point A to Point B on a bike, they can serve that info up to people searching for directions on Google Maps.

This is similar to the way Open Street Map has collected user data to generate maps. The open source mapping project asks volunteers to send in GPS data collected from walking, biking or running around on city streets. By combining that data, Open Street Map can create highly detailed maps of city streets with much less effort than traditional mapping services.

Google says most GPS units will work, like Magellan or Garmin devices, but it is unclear whether smartphones, like an Android or iPhone device, can be used to gather data. Traditional GPS devices also collect information like elevation and speed which users can use to graph various sets of data in Google Earth.

In addition Google has embedded a full Web browser into Google Earth so users can explore the home pages of business they might discover in the application. Pro users also can view parcel, demographic and traffic layers, as well as take advantage of improved GIS importing, better overlay generation, and support for the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS).

If you'd like a different way to visualize potential hiking or biking trails, check out this Web-based tool that can graph out elevation change using the Google Maps API. Simply place two or more points on a map and the app will create a graph of the elevation between those points. This can be helpful to the outdoorsy types that want to see if the bike trail suggested by Google maps is leading them uphill or downhill.