Zmarties

Having used Google Earth for a while, I decided to come up with my own data layer for it. The result is a data file covering all the countries (and a few dependent territories) throughout the world.

For each country, it shows the flag of the country, and provides links to

* Books about the country (via Amazon)
* facts from the CIA World Factbook
* Google search for the country, plus images and news
* Lonely Planet info about the country
* the country's entry in the Wikipedia

The file is proving quite popular on the official Google Earth forums at

Countries and territories of the world

You can also access the kml file from
http://www.zmarties.com/earth/about/countries.htm

That page will also take you to a web page based version of the same information, with additional links to maps in Virtual Earth, Google Maps, MultiMap, and Yahoo! maps.