Hey! Sorry to take so long to get back to you - we've been busy playing around with thing :-) It's great! As for writing about in the Blog, that'd be fantastic! Let me address your message;

Regarding the update rate, I definitely take your point; as word spread about it (through here and other channels) the load on the server started jumping up pretty quickly. The search for all of the flights into LAX, during peak times, can be a hefty one (it does a lot of computation). In order to make things easier, we've now modified it so that the .kml is written once every 15 seconds or so instead of being generated on the fly by a query. Now everyone pulls off of the same .kml file.

Regarding the KMZ format, we're headed in that direction, but we're looking for some tools that will work with the software we're using (ASP.NET and VB - any pointers? :-)

We're now using the built-in icon, and we're getting set up to have it rotate in the correct direction.

The altitude data could be a bit whacked in some cases, but for the most part it should be valid... we're going to keep playing with it to see if there are "too many" invalid altitude points and find out what's up with it.

A heads-up, we've already modified our Google-search Flight Tracking interface to allow users to track individual flights with GE - the single flight tracking is updated once per minute (the frequency of individual flight updates), and uses extruded altitude indicators, showing the last 10 altitudes, so you get a trail/path of where the aircraft has been.

We're going to be doing a lot more integration with our site and with GE; we're planning on having the historical flight retrieval hooked into it by tomorrow, so that you can go back and pull up any past flight dating back to November of 2005 and plot its complete track, from start to finish, through GE.

If you'd like to contact me directly, drop me an email - service@fboweb.com, and just ask for Andy in it :-)

Thanks again!