Zmarties

Google Earth is the downloadable application from Google that uses the same satellite data as Google Maps, but which literally takes it into another dimension. The images can be scrolled as with Google Maps, but can also be viewed from an angle and rotated - and since the data is augmented with altitude data, some of these views can be most spectacular.

[The downloads page has been temporarily disabled, whilst Google increase capacity of their servers]. The free entry level version of the application runs on Windows, but the enterprise version runs on Linux.

Data for overlaying the images with points of interest is stored in KML files. Google have put together documentation for the KML file format so that other people can produce these files.

You can search via Google for kml files (and their compressed kmz equivalent), though beware that these will also bring up some non-google earth kml files.

• search for kml files (a claimed 5430 files at the time of writing this post, but after removing duplicates only 86 remain)
  
• search for kmz files (a claimed 73 results at the time of writing this post)

Specific feeds of interest include:

• USGS Earthquakes
  
• Latest 50 geotagged flickr photos, updated every 30 mins
• Closest 50 geotagged flickr photos within 100km to the point you're looking at.
• Closest 50 geotagged del.icio.us pages within 2000km to the point you're looking at.

More static files of interest include:

• An overlay to update the image of a Chicago airport
• Tourism in Monaco