My Google Map Blog

One of my favorite features of Google Earth is the historical imagery tool. Being able to click a button and view imagery from years past is an amazing. If you're not familiar with this feature, here's a quick overview of how it works:

Taking advantage of this feature, Brian Schrock has set up a blog called the Google Earth Time Machine, which shows comparisons of various locations via the historical imagery tool. A great example are the two images below, which show the results of when a dam was placed on the Berg River in South Africa.

He's also posted some animations that make it easy to see the changes to a particular area. A great example of that is London as they prepared for the 2012 Olympic Games. This image shows the area in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012:

Brian has posted dozens of examples over the past few years, and it's worth your time to check them out at googleearthtimemachine.blogspot.com.

(via +Google Earth Community)

Why is he hiding his face? And what are the other guys doing? Just washing the car? And what’s up with the balloons?

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A major winter storm is ripping across the eastern United States right now, with blizzard warnings stretching 730 continuous miles. Google Earth offers some great tools for tracking storms such as this, allowing you to really dig in and see what's going on.

To start, you can enable the "Clouds" and "Radar" layers under the main [Weather] layer to get a look at the current conditions. Using those tools with this storm helps to show just how massive it is:

The radar and cloud layers are actually positioned miles above the surface of the planet in Google Earth, allowing you to fly below them to see the original imagery. As a cute bonus feature from Google, if you fly below rain or snow you'll actually see the precipitation falling when you're below the clouds. Here is a screenshot with snow falling, though it's hard to see when it's a static image:

To get details for a particular city, simply enable the "Conditions and Forecasts" layer, then click the icon for a city to get a detailed forecast:

Of course, you can also view radar information on your favorite weather site, many of which use Google-powered maps (such as my favorite, the "WunderMap" on Weather Underground).

If you're affected by this storm, we offer you our best. Stay warm and safe!

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As we’re getting closer to New Years Eve, we already have plenty to celebrate here at StreetViewFun.com. We now have more than 10.000 StreetView images posted to this site since 2007. That’s an average of about 5 new images added every day! Earlier this year Google Maps StreetView (and StreetViewFun.com) celebrated 5 years. 2012 has been an amazing year for StreetView with many new countries added and some stunning and hilarious new images.

A special thanks to all of you guys who have submitted funny sightings!

(Psst… don’t tell anyone, but we have some exciting surprises for you coming early 2013.)

As we often showcase from time to time, today we're looking at an awesome 3D model from Vicente Coll (known as VCN 3D in the 3D Warehouse). It's a model of the Edificio Navis in Valencia, Spain.

The Edificio Navis was built in 2009, stands 262 feet high, and holds 22 residential floors. Vicente modeled it simply because it "is one of the tallest in the zone and it wasn't in Google Earth". To see it for yourself, you can check it out in the 3D Warehouse or fly directly to it in Google Earth by using this KML file.

Great work, Vicente!

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