How cool is this?

Now you can find YouTube videos connected to specific locations right in Google Earth. You’ll find this new layer in the ‘Featured Content’ folder in the left-side panel of Google Earth. Just click on the ‘YouTube’ button, and icons will begin to appear all over the globe. You can search for videos of your favorite places or browse videos of your dream vacation destination. More videos will appear as you zoom into a particular place. And you have the option of either playing them in Google Earth or viewing them on YouTube.

Think of what this can do for organic journalism. Instead of relying on YouTube’s “Related Videos” sidebar and hoping the tags and descriptions put all the right videos together, you can just go right to the scene of the crime, so to speak (c’mon, you know that makes the most interesting news video), and look to see how many different cameras captured the item of interest at a unique geographic location. Be sure to geotag your vids now!

Of course, to be truly useful, Google Earth will have to add a “Date Range” filter to that layer, so you can zoom in on a particular point in spacetime, not just space. Eventually these aspects of Google Earth could enable a TiVo-meets-Wikipedia record of the entire world.

Or at least the sensationalistic bits.



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