Holiday Trees throughout Google Earth

Now that Google has introduced 3D trees to Google Earth 6, they’ve decided to take it a step further and drop decorated trees in various places around the globe.

tree-at-30-rock.jpg

According to their blog, these special trees can be found in 14 different locations. However, they’ve only revealed 11 of them. Here are the 11 that they’ve shown:

• Boston Common, Boston, MA
• Skyline Park, Denver, CO
• Grove Plaza, Boise, ID
• Alster Fountain, Hamburg, Germany
• North Capital of Texas Highway, Austin, TX
• Place Du Parvis Notre-Dame, Paris, France
• Old Town Square, Prague, Czech Republic
• Red Square, Moscow, Russia
• Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY
• Pier 39, San Francisco, CA
• Trafalgar Square, London, England

I tracked down those 11 trees and loaded them into this KMZ file for you. Now, who can find the other three?

Below is the video that shows off the first 11. Leave a comment if you’re able to find any of the others.

Just When You Began to Think the Front Range Was All That…

They roll this out…

This afternoon, I sat through the “Collaboration Panel” discussion. The panel was made of of a few people representing state, regional and local governments and well as utilities and academia. Almost uniformly, there was a fear (yes, I mean fear) of crowdsourcing that was best summed up by the following statement:

“Crowdsourcing presents a vulnerability to us.”

Fear of accurate maps?  I wish I was there to see who could have this backward stance, but it doesn’t really matter.  The tide is against them and in time they will be washed away.  If there wasn’t a better reason to have SOTM 2011 in Denver, I can’t think of anything else.  These folks need help and if the Front Range is the great hope for the USA, we are screwed.

Can’t find my way home because the map isn’t crowdsourced!