Google Earth and cemetery photographs

When I first saw Google Earth, I thought "hey, that's neat" but after a preliminary play with it, lost interest as I didn't see what ongoing use it was to me. How many times can you zoom from your house to your office after all?

But now we've found a use for it. By locating the cemeteries we photograph on Google Earth, we can create a Google Earth Placemaker and put it onto our WWW pages. Here's an example (click on the link on the 2nd bottom line -- assumes you have already installed Google Earth). So our users can now find out exactly where on earth each cemetery is. Well, at least our broadband users can, I think Google Earth might not be a great experience on dial-up.

And since the placemarker file has a free text area, it can contain a URL to our photo pages. So I can upload the placemarker onto the keyhole BBS (with the embedded URL) where it is accessible to others. I presume that Google will index the keyhole BBS entries, thus enabling people to use Google to find placemarkers of interest to them. I've been adding them to the People and Cultures topic as that seemed the most appropriate place for cemeteries.

We've now added Google Earth placemarker to about half our cemeteries. In a few cases, the resolution for the area is so poor that it's simply not possible to accurately locate the cemetery. But where the resolution is good, you can usually identify structures like churches, pavilions, lychgates and so forth. And the graves themselves appear as a regular grid of white spots. Once you become aware of what a cemetery looks like from space, they become quite easy to spot.

I presume soon anyone putting a physical address onto the WWW will include a Google Earth placemarker.

What I am wondering is when we will be able to put the placemarkers (which are XML files when all is said and done) into the comment field of a JPEG photo and thus provide "streetscape" views to complement the eye-in-the-sky view of Google Earth.