Must have GIZMOS

Video: Google Earth Tour Of Disney World in 3D

Walt Disney World has released 3D models of their parks in Orlando, and, with Google's help, they are now part of the "3D Buildings" layer built in to Google Earth. There is also a layer found under "Gallery->Travel and Tourism->Walt Disney World" which provides placemarks with more information (video, audio, and fun facts) about the parks and the hotels. Included are complete 3D models and information of the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Disney's Hollywood Studios, Disney's Animal Kingdom, and Disney's Resorts.

Once again, to see Disney in 3D, you need to fly to Disney World in Orlando (enter "Disney World" in the "Fly To" search of Google Earth). Then make sure you have the "3D Buildings" layer turned on. via

Google Earth Comes To Your Browser

Google released a new plugin that allows Google Earth to be embedded into a browser. The plugin will allow developers to create mashups using imagery from Google Earth (and Google Sky) and will also allow existing Google Maps mashups to be converted using just one line of code.

Here's a video showing the plugin in action.

via

We're Back! Webmonkey Relaunches, Rejoins Wired

The original web developer's resource has returned. Webmonkey has been completely redesigned, and we're ready to rock once more. Also, our entire content library is now hosted on a wiki, so every tutorial, reference page and code example is open for editing. Come on in and show us what you've got!

Webmonkey is a free, public resource for web developers. Builders, designers and programmers like you — the people who know best — write the articles, tutorials, code snippets and other contributions.

All I have to say is...It's about TIME!

Google Blurs Faces In Street View

According to the Google Blog, they have started rolling out a new technology that automatically blurs the faces of people caught on camera by the Street View van. The advanced state-of-the-art automatic face detection will also be applied to images already taken.

Google have also started using higher quality images for Street View and the blog shows updated images of Manhattan, one of the first cities captured by Google. via

Doodle 4 Google, Inviting Students to Design the Google Logo

Doodle 4 Google is a competition organized by Google that invites K-12 students to submit their version of the Google logo around the theme “What If…?”. The winner will have their design featured on the Google homepage on May 22nd, 2008, along with a$10,000 college scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.

Here's a time lapse video that shows Chief Google Doodler Dennis Hwang draw a Google Doodle from start to finish. He creates a doodle that commemorates the Lunar New Year and invites students to join the Doodle 4 Google art competition.

Google Health Coming Soon?

Spotted by Google Blogscoped is a login page for Google Health, Google’s entry into the online health records space. At the time of writing the site isn’t allowing logins, but it does include this text:

With Google Health, you can:

• Build online health profiles that belong to you
• Download medical records from doctors and pharmacies
• Get personalized health guidance and relevant news
• Find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services
• Share selected information with family or caregivers

The other thing to note is the logo (we’ve included it in this post), it would appear that Google Health is going straight to Beta and not through Google Labs.

AnyTV

AnyTV is a standalone Windows application that provides quick access to the hundreds of TV and radio streams around the world. The application is easy to use and is much better than visiting one of the hundreds of websites that are littered with adverts and popups.

You can download the application here (direct download link here if you want to avoid all the adverts). via

Incase you need to get from Here to There

Google Maps has the answer..

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Google Announces Knol, An Author Driven Knowledge Project

Google has announced Knol, their new author driven knowledge project that appears to be a direct response to services like Wikipedia and Mahalo.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

I bet knol.com has received alot of hits since the announcement.

YouTube for Teachers - TeacherTube

TeacherTube provides an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill.

Want an example of what you can find? How about this one. Officer raps the rules of the new school year to the theme of Ice Ice Baby.