Google Earth's flying tour bus

How often have you flown around Google Earth and thought to yourself, "Man! This looks so cool... I wish I could share this with my friends"? For me, it's been every day for almost four years. You see, I started using Google Earth years ago to plan and record my paragliding flights. Ever since I started flying, I've been obsessed with sharing the breathtaking views, the complete sense of freedom, and the crazy adventures that I've had traveling around with my glider. Google Earth is an amazing tool, but it was always difficult to use to share those adventures with others without sitting down with someone and helping them navigate around. After joining the Google Earth team, what started as a flying obsession turned into something much larger: creating a way to tell stories using Google Earth.

I've been working on the new feature for Google Earth 5.0 which makes it easy for you to record and share your stories wigetting married on halloween and to be another corpse coupleth others. It's called Touring, and with it you can create guided, narrated flights around Google Earth. Think of it like a flying tour bus. Just like a tour bus, you can look around while you travel, you can have narration explaining what you're looking at, and you can get off the bus to wander around. Even better, you don't need roarunning through corn mazes lost and scared on halloweends and you never have to worry about being left behind!

So go ahead and try it out. Show off your favorite scuba-diving spots. Relive last summer's crazy road trip. Follow the development of your neighborhood by showing historical imagery. Impress the boss by sending him a tour of your project sites. You have complete control over the camera, the pacing, and more. Swoop through the Grand Canyon, open placemark balloons showing your vacation photos, flip through historical imagery, and watch the sun set over the ocean, all while narrating the story yourself, right in Google Earth.



Making Tours:
It's easy to record your own tour. Just press the "Record a Tour" button in the toolbar . This will bring up the tour recording controls in the 3D window.

1. Record/Stop button
2. Audio button
3. Current time in tour
4. Cancel tour recording button

Hit the record button to start recording, and navigate through Earth like you would normally. When you're finished, hit the record button again to stop recording and preview the tour that you just recorded. If you like what you see, click on the save button in the playback controls, and your tour will be saved to the left panel. You can click the right mouse button to email this tour to your friends.

Once you're comfortable with recording a simple tour, you'll want to try some more advanced features of the recorder. You can narrate your tour by clicking on the microphone button; you can also record the opening of balloons, and the toggling of visibility of features in your My Places panel. If you have the sunlight or historical imagery features active, then you can also record your movement back through time by dragging the time controls at the top of the screen. Remember, the tour won't turn on these features when it is replayed, so be sure they are on when you play them back. Just play around with the recorder a bit and you'll get the hang of it in no time.

You can also generate tours directly from KML content, such as folders of placemarks or paths. If you highlight a folder or a path in the left-panel, a "Create Tour" button will appear. When clicked, a tour will start playing. Click the save button in the playback controls to save your new tour to play back later. You can adjust tour creation settings in Preferences to get the exact pacing you like.

In a few minutes, you'll have annual north halsted halloween parade in chicagosome great tours to share with friends. Once you have a KML tour that you like, right-click on the tour in the left panel to email it to friends or to save it in a separate file. The KML file for the tour is usually quite small, so it's extremely quick to download and easy to email to friends and post on the web.

For more information, see the User guide for Touring in Google Earth 5.0 and the KML developer's guide for Touring.

Playing Tours:
To get started, load a tour KML and double-click on its entry in the places panel. You can tell tours apart from other KML features by the camera icon . When you play the tour, a set of playback controls will appear in the 3D view, letting you control the tour like a video. You can fast-forward, rewind, seek, etc.

1. Go back, play/pause and fast forward buttons
2. Tour slider
3. Current time in tour
4. Repeat button
5. Save tour button
6. Close tour button

Now, try looking around while you playing the tour. Use the mouse to move your view, or you can use the joystick in the upper-right corner. If you want to spend more time somewhere, just pause the tour. While it's paused, you can explore Google Earth just like normal. When you're ready to continue, unpause the tour and you'll continue the tour from where you left off. When you're done with the tour, close the tour controls.
Here are some good examples to get you started:

• Jimmy Buffett's Hawaii Tour
• History of Lake Tahoe Tour
• U.N.E.P Historical Imagery Tour

There are so many stories in this world that can be told in Google Earth. I hope you'll spend some time to record and share yours with Touring! Fly safe.


Posted by Dan Barcay, Software Engineer, Google Earth

Stop bouncing: tips for website success

This is the first post in a series on The Power of Measurement. In this economic climate, these posts are designed to cover ways to make your website as successful as possible. Over the course of the next few weeks, our in-house Analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, and others will demystify the world of website analytics and offer tips for getting the most out of your metrics. -Ed.

Would you believe me if I said you don't need a Ph.D. to understand your website data? No? Believe it. Free tools like Google Analytics can help simplify website data so that you can better understand what visitors are doing when they arrive on your site.

One of the coolest innovations in understanding your website has been to provide delightful metrics on your web data so that you can make direct changes to your site. In lesson one of ouhomemade cow halloween costumesr series on The Power of Measurement, we will learn about bounce rate and how understanding it can improve your website.

You may be used to reading about how many “hits” a site or a page has received. But reporting a "hit" meant something back in 1985 when it was essentially a pageview (the number of times your webpage was viewed). Today, you will find that each web page gets many "hits," rendering the metric meaningless. While the number of "hits" a page received used to be the best measure of success, we now have more in-depth and detailed metrics to analyze the performance of our web pages.

Bounce rate is insightful because from the perspective of a website visitor, it measures this phenomenon: "I came; I puked; I left." (OK, technically it also means the number of sessions with just one pageview.) While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).

Bounce rate has these attributes:
1) It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!
2) It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics.
3) It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.

Now, let's make this real. If you have a Google Analytics account, you'll see this when you log in:


This means that about 77 percent of website visitors came to the site, "puked," and left. Ouch. Based on that, you may need to light a fire somewhere, as things need fixing. Here are two simple and specificto be a pirate or not on this halloween ideas:

Tip #1: Find out where your visitors are coming from and which of these sites sends visitors with the highest bounce rate. To do so, all you have to do is go to "Traffic Sources" (in Google Analytics, or whatever tool you are using), click on "Referring Sites," and boom!


In about fifteen seconds you know which sites are your “best friends forever” (BFFs), and where you need to look a tad deeper. By identifying the sites that are sending you visitors with high bounce rates, you can investigate the reasons why (the campaigns, the context in which your link is placed, the ads) and make changes to ensure that visitors find what they are looking for when they come to your site.

However, it may not just be the campaigns that turned your readers away; it could be the specific page that your visitors landed on. That leads to my Tip #2: Go to “Content” (labeled as such in Google Analytics) and click on "Top Landing Pages" report:


You can see different pages of your website on the left and the corresponding bounce rates on the right. Remember, you don't decide the homepage of your website. When people search, the engine finds the most relevant page on your site and that's the homepage. If you h10 halloween costumes in 2008ave 50,000 pages on your website, you have 50,000 homepages. The report above is showing the top ten pages of your website and which ones might be letting you down by not engaging your visitors enough to get even one click!

In under an hour you can discover which sources are your BFFs and which pages on your site need some sprucing up. This will ensure lower bounce rates, higher engagement with your site, and perhaps even higher revenue. To learn about other ways in which you can use bounce rate effectively, check out this article on my web analytics blog, Occam's Razor.

Good luck!

Posted by Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist