Monday, October 20, 2008

Thing 10 - My 2 cents to maps

I've decided to use Google Earth for my Thing 10 activities. I like "to fly over" places of my childhood vacations, past and future travels, and distant lands with Google Earth, seeing 3-dimentional monuments and recognizing the coastlines I may never see. Ability to add photos to Google maps completely changes your mindset about each destination. I used to imagine places from books, stories, and glimpses in the movies and then surprisingly discover that the place is nothing like I imagined. Well, this is different now: if you do your pre-travel homework with Google Earth , you are destined to come across pictures that will reflect reality pretty accurately. Not to say that anything virtual can compete with real life experiences, but still... That rotating globe has come dangerously close...

The easiest way to add your own photos to Google Earth is through Panoramio, another web photo service. It lets you upload up to 2 gb of photos for free and then map them to Google Earth and Maps right there. Here are my Panoramio additions from the trips to Amsterdam, San-Michele Cemetery in Venice, and Verona.

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