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(Via Ogle Earth.) Mac users of Google Earth are getting a new kind of “thank you” after downloading the app. One of the “featured KML links” on the download page is to a giant KML cover of Maxim magazine, of all things. Is this the dawn of KML advertising on Google Earth? If you already have the app or if you’re on a PC, just dial over to GE’s Mac download page, cancel the download, and launch GE from the Maxim pic, while it’s still there. Actually, you should be able to launch it from this KML link too.

I like this post from Erin Banister, who runs the “virtual assistant” firm Trinity Jacobs:

Last night my niece came to me asking for some help with her MySpace page, and I couldn’t help but ask what drew her to MySpace to begin with. As I was fiddling around with her page, she delved into these intense relationships she’s developed with other people who have MySpace accounts (most of whom she knew in the ‘real world’ beforehand), the feeling of belonging (from having a bazillion ‘friends’), and just being able to post her feelings at any time. Mostly, she said, having a MySpace account makes her feel popular.

With a little help from Jeremiah Owyang, Erin goes on to consider what it means to have a younger generation coming up that’s being introduced to tools like blogging, social software and avatarized environments like MySpace at an early age. (more…)

Discovery Communications (they of the Discovery Channel) announced today that their video content would soon be available on Google Earth. (Via Glitchy.) The initial release will offer “informative and engaging video content showcasing 10 of America’s most popular National Parks,” according to Discovery’s press release. “By clicking on Discovery’s globe icon shown at destination sites at which Discovery video content is available, Google Earth users will launch an interactive broadband player hosted by Discovery that will enable them to select from several two- to four-minute compelling videos from Discovery’s rich archive at each target destination.” Nice idea. Nicer idea: Users being able to add their own video links to Google Earth. Is this possible already? Not sure.

There’s a good article at MTV.com (via Glitchy) about the new weather system that was recently added to World of Warcraft. Developer Blizzard Entertainment is starting, not surprisingly, with storms. The article goes into a nice level of detail about what they’re envisioning for the weather system and how they’re implementing it. It won’t have any effects on gameplay, but it could make the world a more immersive — or dreary — place. With a name like Blizzard, the only surprise is that it took them this long to add snowstorms to their virtual world.

Ogle Earth reports on this message board post by the Rev. Dan Catt, who’s been doing cool stuff connecting the Web to real-world locations and is now working for Flickr, in which Catt “unofficially” mentions a service he may or may not be working on to replace the old Geobloggers site (which was all about collaboratively mapping location-tagged photos) with “a service . . . that’ll aggregate the data and make it available via an API.” Very interesting implications for the kind of collaborative virtual location-mapping I was pondering here, especially if it can be made to work with Google Earth.

Journalist Noche Kandora, known in Second Life as Cheri Horton, has been on an interesting quest in recent weeks: to create an avatar that mimics her real-life appearance as closely as possible. “Users also have the option of purchasing ‘skins’ that can add an original dimension to an avatar’s image,” Kandora writes in this blog post (which is not necessarily safe for work). “What I plan to do now is replicate my real-life likeness and use it as my new avatar skin.” (Image lifted from Kandora’s site, apogeevr.com.) (more…)

Virtual-world to real-world crossovers don’t have to take place only on the Web. As readers of my other blog well know, one of my favorite virtual worlds is the space opera EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online game that affords its players far more freedom than most. Players respond accordingly, creating fantastic emergent gameplay moments not just in the game but in the real world as well. EVE fanfic abounds, but my favorite 3pointD crossover of recent weeks has been the pint glasses that the father of one of my corp-mates has been engraving for us based on screenshots of in-game ships. Pictured above is an Executioner, an Amarr frigate designed to take out enemy ships of similar size. (more…)