Google Earth Gets a YouTube Atmosphere

A further sign that you don't need the real world so long as you have Google: the search engine company has now integrated its Google Earth map program with YouTube, the video site it bought last year. Videos location-marked on YouTube will now be available on the Google Earth's satellite view, so users can watch footage from halfway around the world just by looking at the map.

Photo-sharing websites have previously experimented with "geotagging," the practice of encoding longitude and latitude on images and then associating that data with a map. But the Google Earth-YouTube pairing now makes it possible to zoom in on cities or even streets and find footage related to that place. The effectiveness, however, depends on YouTube users' making the links. (More Google Earth stories.)