I’ve been flying around the Google Earth for fun.  It’s not clear to me what the killer app is yet, but it really is pretty cool to visualize spaces and distances, and some of the imagery (like the salt flats in the south bay) is just awesome.

But I also found a cool visualization application.  Here’s the story:

Almost 2 years ago I dropped a horseshoe in our neighborhood geocache, with a travelbug dogtag.  A travelbug is an object that hitches rides with geocachers to move from place to place.  This horseshoe, named Hufi, was destined for a cache in Germany.  Every few weeks, somebody moves it, logs its progress on the web, and I get a mail notifying me of the event.  Pretty cool way to track an object around the globe!

Well, each cache has latitude and longitude coordinates, and Google Earth has markers that can be set by latitude and longitude.  So I went through and put the history of Hufi’s journey in.  Now you can fly along with Hufi as he bounces around California, the UK, and Denmark.  Hopefully spiraling in on his final destination in Germany.

Try it out, install Google Earth, and load up this file.  Hufi’s journey is pretty interesting!