Panaramio (Google Earth's photo layer)

Abstract

Panoramio is a location aware photo sharing website. Currently, some of the location-tagged photos uploaded to the site can be accessed as a layer in Google Earth, with new photos being added at the end of every month. (wikipedia)

Content

So the whole idea is simple. You probably have a bunch of photos with some astonishingly beautiful in your opinion landscape, townscape or cityscape on it. You wouldn't probably rush to print them because

• you don't print them anyway
• those photos are your memories about places and sights but their are not really private so it's of little value for most of people around
• you wait until the moment you can make a nice photo album from after having collected more material

In the meantime, you can share some of your memories with a large community of Goolge Earth users and a smaller community of Panoramio users, that will be shortly added to the growing Google Empire.

You can see your own pictures in Google Earth :) after some time. Now it takes in average 15 days before photo materials are published to Google Earth. Quite soon there could be no delay whatsoever after Google's acquisition of Panoramio.

So, now you can argue the fact that it's a complete waste of your time. Well, there's a fact that you sacrifice some of your time to a very large Internet community. Just keep in mind that all pictures in Google Earth are uploaded by a smaller part of the same large Internet community. Why not to contribute to the good deed of saving our memories???

What you get back:

• memories ( read photo materials) are stored not on your unreliable hard drives but in Data Centers where a mechanical failure in a hard drive does not lead to a loss of data which is stored on a RAID.
• better services in Google Earth
• easy sharing with your friends. It can become as easy as integrating an RSS feed into your favorite News Reader.

If you don't contribute it's OK too. Just keep in mind if one day you'll have the craving to contribute something from your public life you can do it.