Google Earth is going to fundamentally redefine how we use the internet. That’s obvious to me after a few days of slack-jawed intensive use. Luckily, my work PC could handle the the graphical demands without protestA Mac version is in the works.. Luckily, Felix alerted me of its release in time so I could download a copy before — and this must be a first — Google was inundated and had to stop further downloads for now.Update 2005-07-04: Google Earth downloads are again available.

I’m being this enthusiastic because I found Google Earth to be a groundbreaking application on at least two mutually reinforcing fronts: As a viscerally beautiful experience, and as a revolution in how we will instinctively “place” information in our mind’s eye. The former is the eyecandy that will lead everyone to the latter, I think.

I love maps, and always have. I love nothing more than to be dropped off in a new city with a map and the day ahead of me. The love affair came early — my preschooler self demanded endless guided tours from parents through the household’s (to me, then) human-sized atlas. And it wasn’t just Earth: maps of the Moon, Mars and the night sky, diagrams of the solar system and the galaxy all seeded what grew to be a need for knowing, for lack of a less presumptuous phrase, my place in the universe.

When I lived in Australia as a teenager, I tried imagining exactly where my relatives in Europe stood as I spoke to them on the phone. If I looked straight down and a little to the North and West of me, near the edge of that Persian carpet, there they’d be, 12,000 km away on the other side of molten magma, feet pointing my way.

I’d also readily imagine myself gazing at Earth from space when trying to figure out how the seasons came about, or why sunsets are always quick and punctual at the equator. TV programs did this too, of course, but computers in the 80s and 90s were not nearly ready to do my bidding live in 3D.

Now there is Google Earth. Sure, I have the screensaver that lets you play Superman with Earth, but Google’s offering is just stunningly better. Where to begin? A quick list: In some places in Sweden, the level of detail is such that you can see the shadows of individual people as you zoom in… You can add translucent roadmap overlays that shimmer into existence as you come in closer… You can turn height information into fully fledged 3D mountains… You can then look up at the horizon and fly through this landscape
The Hoover dam in 3D. Click for more.…

So where have I been recently? I revisited some 3D terrains I know well, like the Lake District in the UK, where the vantage points are remarkably accurate. I flew through the Hunza valley in Northern Pakistan. I found our old swimming pool in Sydney. I checked out Terra del Fuego and flew over the stunning West coast of Greenland. I also took to aiming for Earth from afar at random and then zooming in all the way — once I ended up near a tabletop mountain in the Southern Venezuelan Amazon basin that has a most beautiful hidden valley.Sorry not to be able to supply coordinates, which I now feel I should, but I don’t have access to Google Earth here at home where I blog.

That’s the eyecandy part of this impressive application. But Google’s cleverness lies in really just letting all this be a kind of backdrop, a lure to where the real revolution is going to happen. Here it is: Anyone can publish a layer for Google Earth linking places on the internet to places on Earth. The application comes preloaded with a sampling of such layers, such as volcanoes or recent earthquakes, or links to sites for coordinate confluences. But the possibilities are far broader than I can currently grasp. One blogger is tracing the Tour the France. Flickr photos that are “geotagged” with coordinates can already be made to appear automatically. I myself am mostly done converting a link-list of Swedish universities into such a layer — turning that information into a far far more compelling experience for foreign students considering studying in Sweden.

Where will all this lead? It seems evident to me that a physical location is less arbitrary than a URL, as most everything in cyberspace refers back to something in physical space, be it a news story’s dateline, a travel diary, an institution’s website, or a restaurant review. Blogs too are written from somewhere, with location often defining content. So why not turn blogrolls into a Google Earth layer? Why not have The BBC turn its datelines into pointers on Google Earth and update that layer in sync with its website? Why not turn my address book into a layer?

Google is hoping for that, I’m sure. Google Earth comes with a built-in browser (the Google browser!) to facilitate precisely this kind of interchange: On the top half of the screen, the Earth browser; on the bottom, if you want, the web browser. I imagine that soon, surfing from geotagged website to geotagged website will be accompanied with a moving zooming live Earth; a visit to www.who.org leads to a view of Geneva, for example, where my address book markers show me that my friend Eurof, who lives there, is currently online with Skype. I also notice there is an exhibit of pre-Columbian art on around the corner from him, courtesy of a marker sponsored by the Tribune de Genève, so I ask him if he’s been and if it’s worth the trouble.

Then, when I’m done procrastinating, I go back to the WHO site and click on the story about an outbreak of Marburg in the Uige province of Angola, and the Earth view automatically moves there. Perhaps I will be able to switch on an overlay of gridded population densities, or child mortality (provided by the WHO?), letting me further understand the context of the news. Perhaps somebody will have taken pictures from the region on a recent trip, and geotagged them. Maybe one of the doctors there is blogging it, and her blog shows up in the view. Perhaps Wikipedia will have geotagged its article on Uige by then.

The web is getting to be ridiculously good.