As some may know this site serves a number of Network Links for Google Earth, for a long time I have thought it would be fun to map the data from that, but finally got round to trying it. This is still work in progress, so the current images are very much easly tests, but shows promise, hopefully can make some better visualizations – maybe even as KMZ 
‘Lookat’ point v1: (click for 145k version)
View In Google Earth (don’t forget to try adjusting the tranparency slider!)
Shows some interesting patterns, there are a number of lines on the map, and definitily appears to be flight lines, I suspect this is from people leaving tours on loop, and a fudging a networklink to refresh periodically. Not sure how else to explain such repeatable loops – can a large number of visitors really be all following the same route? I’ll investigate this more in follow up map(s).
But WHAT is that point in the middle of the Atlantic?
Update: this is from about 900k hits from aug-nov ’07 – still processing the rest of the data!
Update 2: More maps here, all maps seem to to show the same overall pattern which is slightly puzzling, eg the IPs graph suggests that many users are following these flight lines.
Barry, cool maps! When I first bring up the “Nearby Links” in Google Earth it zooms from that point in the Atlantic Ocean to my default starting location. Could this be the lines you are seeing?
Ah yes, well almost. It seems that loading Google Earth shows that point initially (even with no layers loaded), then goes to default position – haven’t really noticed that before – tend to leave GE loading in the background while doing something else so don’t notice that sequence. So that explains that – also why number of users still shows the pattern
However why getting that? I only have one link that doesn’t use onStop – the flight recorder. So it must be that people leave it in record mode (probably accidentally!) so next time GE starts up it records the flight from there – the flight happens quickly so it must happen a lot to get density. Will try another map excluding the flight recorder.
Update: seems the recorder isnt included in this graph anyway – have to figure if this is a phemonia from a specific service!… (but it does mean I get to also try plotting the flight recorder as a seperate graph.
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