ReadWriteWeb

Google Earth released version 6.2 today. It patches up some of the choppy textures it used to have, so it now looks like a smooth, realistic surface - no more "quilt effect." The texture improvements are now in all versions of Google Earth, including the mobile versions. This update also adds Google+ integration. Screenshots from Google Earth can be shared with Google+ circles with a new "share" button.

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.

Imagine a model of the entire earth that shines brightly in the palm of your hand, that you can spin around and zoom into, with clear details visible down to a half meter in some places and that you can use to view the locations of things like daily diary entries from the Jane Goodall Institute's chimpanzee team out in the jungle or 3D models of the ancient monuments of Rome. That would be insane, wouldn't it?

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.

One of the wonderful results of networked intelligence is the revelation of the already-there. Geoglyphs. Could there be anything more there than a work of art built out of or incised into the earth itself? But the earth, she is big, and you can't get your mind around the whole of it and apprehend its multitudinous parts, or even the small patterns they form. Well, you couldn't, but now you can.

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.

A new version of Google Earth for Android was released today to be able to take advantage of the larger form factor of and robust computing power of Honeycomb tablets.

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.

In a number of places, places rich in history and therefor rich in latent archaeological information, it is too hard to dig. Either the politics, terrain or the need to budget makes even educated guesswork prohibitive. But now, an Australian archaeologist has found almost 2,000 new sites in Saudia Arabia using a program that takes less than a minute to download: Google Earth.

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.

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. 

Google Earth has always had an incredible "wow" factor. But the newly-released Google Earth 6, in Google's own words, takes "realism in the virtual globe to the next level." This version adds two new features, an integrated Street View experience and 3D trees, and also makes it easier to browse historical imagery associated with a specific location.

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.

Google has announced the latest version of Google Earth for Android with a list of new features, including the ability to dive beneath the surface and explore the ocean depths.

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.

While we certainly don't expect you'll begin planning your days around the new feature, Google has added a new layer to Google Earth that makes it feel even more like you're taking a live, real-time look at the earth from a satellite above - real-time weather.

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

In the wake of the BP oil disaster, real-time mapping technologies have been recruited to improve communication and promote collaboration between people in local communities, as well as federal, state and local responders. Last week NOAA released GeoPlatform.gov to provide near-real-time mapping data to those connected to the crisis.

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.