Google Earth Plays YouTube Videos!

Google announced today that it has finalized the “YouTube” layer for Google Earth. Now, you can zoom into a region of the world and then with a click, watch videos tied to that location.

Of course, this requires appropriate geo-tagging by the person uploading the video (which you can’t always count on), but what a great feature! When you’re tooling around Google Earth, researching your next destination, you can also stop and enjoy some videos related to that area. This is similar to the “Book Layer” feature, except it shows you locations referenced in videos, rather than mentioned in books. By the way, I found it under the “Gallery” Layers, which is not where the blog post notes it will be. Kind of hard to find – but worth it.

Google rightly warns, if you turn on this layer in Google Earth, you might not get any work done today. I suspect that’s true – I certainly got sucked into it!