Slashgeo

The Google Earth Blog discuss the new photo geocoding capabilities of Picasa Web Albums. Picasa, the application, was already able to to geocode photos in collaboration with Google Earth. From the official blog;: "First, we're excited to let you know about 'Map My Photos' -- it lets you show exactly where you took your favorite snapshots. When you share an album with friends, they can see your best photos arrayed on a map (or even Google Earth). It's the perfect way to showcase a memorable road trip or a globe-trotting vacation. [...] But wait! There's more. We're also launching the first version of Picasa Web Albums built specifically for mobile devices." Meanwhile, Ogle Earth compares this new offering with Flickr and Panoramio.

The official Google Lat Long blog informs us of a new mapplet to browse geotagged Picasa Web Albums on Google Maps. From the post: "Now we have a new Mapplet that lets you search and browse all of the geolocated photos in Google Maps. Just click here to add the Picasa Web Albums Mapplet to your "My Maps" tab. Then, zoom in to your favorite spot on Google Maps, enable our Mapplet and watch the photos roll in! You can see what snapshots exist of your favorite getaway or take a virtual vacation to Paris. The world is your oyster." See also related stories.

The Google Earth Blog has an article up describing this new Google feature. From their summary : "In a move sure to draw comparisons with Microsoft's Photosynth, Google has released a new feature to Panoramio letting you "Look Around" at popular locations around the world. Panoramio is a photo uploading site which uniquely requires all photos to be geotagged when they are uploaded. There are over 5 million photos from Panoramio accessible through both Google Earth and now also available through Google Maps."

For more information and to view the youtube video, please visit the Google Earth Blog.

Three Google geostories. This is an important new feature: the addition of photo zooming capabilities to StreetView: "We have also recently added the option to browse user-contributed photos that match Street View images. Now we're bringing these concepts together to make it easier to explore photos through Street View." To my eyes, this is, in part for the moment, direct competition to Microsoft's Photosynth. The photos comes from Panoramio. Via the JAGIS-L Yahoo group, there's an open source software to generate heatmaps for Google Maps, called gheat. There's also an improvement announcement to MarkerClusterer, another open source software for Google Maps. See also related stories below.

The GEB has a pretty interesting entry named Google Earth Surpasses 500 Million - Auto-Geotagging Coming. From the entry: "# 250,000 public websites hosting KML # 500,000,000 KML/KMZ files hosted on public web sites # 2 Billion placemarks - that's a lot of places! # 500 Million Google Earth activations [...] Michael goes on to predict (at about 5:52) that in the future it will be possible for people to upload photos to the "cloud" and have photos automatically geotagged. How? By comparing your photo with large repositories of known photos (like Street View and Panoramio) until you find a match." We mentioned in February that there was 400M GE activations, see also other related stories below.