Welcome to Google Earth and the Google Earth Community!



You will find that hours enjoyed with Google Earth and the Community posts offer greater understanding of the world and its people than that developed in a lifetime of education, conversation, reading, and television. This is a common experience for Google Earth users. Also common is the realization after a few months' enjoyment that many features and subtle powers of Google Earth and the Google Earth Community were at first overlooked.

To help you get started more easily, this thread contains tips and suggestions based on the comments of thousands of users, Google Earth's developers, and personal experience. Google Earth is a deep application. It rewards those who learn more about using it with greater insight, better understanding, and more fun. This leads to greater wisdom, enhanced awareness of our personal position in the continuity of human life, and if you work at it, guidance in reconsidering personal perceptions of the Earth's people, nations, and situation. Google Earth is the power tool for this voyage of discovery.

Look for numbered posts as follow-ups to this one. The place to start is with a good book.

P.S. If you just landed at this web page by accident and are wondering what Google Earth is, here is the short answer: Google Earth is a computer system that interactively streams more than 10,000 gigabytes of Earth information (images, elevation, business data, ...) to personal computers over the Internet. As a Google Earth user you can explore the earth and zoom down to cities and points of interest, seeing buildings, roads, cars, and even people. Visit earth.google.com for details. The Google Earth Community--where you are now--is the user forum for Google Earth users.