Google is adding new tools to Google Earth on the web that let you build your own tour of a place right on top of the Google Earth map. It’s introducing creation tools in Google Earth’s web version to help you tell your own tales. You can draw place markers, lines and shapes, attach your own media including full-screen slides and choose specific 3D or Street View angles. Chain these items together and you can create tours that reflect your personal narrative, or even the ‘hidden’ history that doesn’t always show up in textbooks.
You can’t create stories in Google Earth’s mobile apps, but you can share them anywhere and invite other would-be cartographers to collaborate. Google envisions this as a tool for not just individuals, but for classrooms, environmental groups and others that want to visualize data in a more exciting way than they could with static maps.
