Back in March of 2008, Time published an article titled How Google Earth Ate Our Town. Big news for our “old coal mining town” of 78.000. We had replaced San Francisco, the 13th largest city in the US as the capital of Google Earth.
I’ll let you read the article, because I want to talk about something different. There’s a new feature that allows you to embed Google Earth into your webpage via an iframe. It lacks some of the major functionality of the full version but it beats Google Maps hands down for a rich user experience.
In addition, Google has their eyes on the Island streets as they troll the towns from Duncan northward for street view footage. While heading out to visit my folks in Duncan, I found myself driving behind a Google car on Herd Road – this was about a week before I read the article in the PQB News.
As a small business, you can use these tools to give out of town clients a better picture of your business. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, it makes you wonder what an interactive 3D map is worth.
If there’s a downside to running Google Earth off of your site, it’s that visitors have to download a plugin (on demand) before it will work. Since I have to do the same with Flash though, it’s hardly an inconvenience.
Visit earth.nanaimo.ca for the City of Nanaimo’s KMZ files.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on July 7, 2009 at 7:54 pm, filed under Content Marketing and tagged Google, Tips. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.