When I was CIO for Utah, I played with a tool call Earthviewer that was based on Keyhole satellite data and let you zoom in on satellite images anywhere in the world. I blogged it and still get some traffic from people googling "earthviewer." We were contemplating buying it for Homeland Security uses. Now it turns out that you can get a lot of the same functionality from Google for free.

When Google bought Keyhole, the satellite image company who owns the data that makes Earthviewer work last year, I wondered what they'd do with it. Now, we know. If you go to Google maps and click on "satellite" in the upper right hand corner, you get actual satellite images for the locations you type in instead of maps. For example, here's the image for the area around Utah's State Capitol. The resolution isn't so hot. Look at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. You can count the cars. This is awesome.