I found an interesting hidden feature today, you can link to Google Earth by location, by using a little re-director on Google Maps, this works for postcodes, addresses, and even coordinates. Of course its quite easy to write such a re-director and I use one, but using Google’s should be more robust. Found via the Google Toolbar button
Update: Experimenting with this it seems you can also manually invoke the non slick interface in Google Maps. (so, so far can found js, kml, and html do something different to normal maps interface)
Update2: over on woowoowoo‘s blog, theres an excellent idea for a bookmarklet to utalise this trick (it seems it work’s on all countries and even for directions!). I have also extended (just add to your favorites/bookmarks) said link to work without having to click ‘link to this map first’.
Hey Barry, nice edition with your Update2!
Now, if you could just re-parse the “link-to-this” for whatever the current lat/lon is it would be perfect. I simply change the current link-to-this into a query (by changing “&ll=” to “&q=” and erasing the “&spn” tag) and then your bookmark works perfect.
Hi Frank,
Is this what you mean?
I hadn’t noticed that the placemark in GE was quite so messy when didnt have a query! So this new version will center on the current view (rather than the placemark) and have a reasonably lat/long labled placemark, however it does mean you will loose the actual address entered.
So its still not perfect, wonder if can do an condictional, if there is an address query entered then use that (but will alway center on placemark even if map dragged) else use the ll to get the center of view.
(ideally Google Maps would correct this and show the placemark propelly and use the ll value to do a Lookat!)
The bookmarklet can be used to open any place found in any mashup, with just one additional click as explained at this post:
http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/tip-save-places-found-in-other-mashups
Only just made the connection, but you can also label the destination like this!