I’ve been spinning the good old Google Earth globe for six months now, so I thought this would be a good time to take stock of the full extent of my nerdliness and see where I’ve been. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m now a frigging Navigator, with a whopping 127 posts. Gosh. And almost all of those were honest-to-goodness hey-come-look-at-this-interesting-thing-over-here posts, none of that planespotting, speedtrap-exposing, every-Walmart-in-the-world nonsense, nor any of the cheap “nice post” comment posts on someone else’s post just to boost your score. No sirree.

The Google Earth Community is now approaching 402,000 members, and people are joining at a rate of about 4,000 a day. The moderators have evidently managed to sift through 337,000 posts on 174,500 different topics, and they’ve certainly been sifting through my stuff because I’ve bounced off them a couple of times.
One was a routine caution because one of my very first posts, the Big Buddha statue on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, had already been posted, so mine got yanked. Gotta keep your eye on the BBS Keyhole layers, which if activated show up all the previous markers.
The other was quite a bit more serious. In mid-February I overlaid a graphic of Iran showing likely targets for US air strikes. I got a comment from another community member saying “nice post” and “hope it survives because mine didn’t”. Puzzled, I checked the post two days after it went in and it wasn’t there anymore! So I consulted one of the Oracles. He checked with the other moderators and discovered that the anti-Washington comments I’d exchanged with this same guy in South America had set off alarm bells at GE HQ, so the post was yanked. It wasn’t censorship; it was cold feet.
The point was made, though, that the graphic I’d posted contained valid information and it came straight from a respected news agency and had been published in newspapers around the world. So the post “Overlay: US strike targets in Iran” was reinserted, but the commentary was “locked down” – no further comment allowed. Fair enough, I agreed, since GE isn’t “that kind of forum”. It’s been downloaded 231 times so far.
Anyway, it’s calculatin’ time. In six months, Dorseyland – that’s me, although I hide behind an avatar image of Dave Letterman cause he’d got this great Google Earth squint – stuck 127 posts in several different GE forums, mostly history- and travel-oriented.
They have collectively generated 6,603 downloads. That’s an average of 52 per post, but of course interest varies widely. There’s no surprise at all in the most popular and least popular: My massive “Bob Marley Commemorative Tour” has been seen 862 times since January 19, and a more recent gander at historic Farnley Hall in Yorkshire, England only twice (and keep in mind I always download my own posts once to test them, so that’s me and one other visitor).
The stats for the other posts are a good indicator of what interests the majority of GE members.
After the Marley biography, which involved 50-odd different locations all wrapped up in one illustrated package – and a whole heap of work – my most popular contribution, to my chagrin, has been a silly little thing called “Risky place to live, Hong Kong”. It was actually my second post, and it shows what I thought was a tiny village, also on Hong Kong, that’s sitting directly beneath a massive dam that’s holding back several square kilometres of water.
I was quickly and not particularly politely set upon by a couple of forum colleagues who pointed out that the “village” is in fact a prison, and that the dam is a massive berm hundreds of metres thick, though there was also the implication that should it burst, only prisoners would suffer. I suspect the snarling was overheard, and that, plus the catchy title, is why it’s been viewed 363 times.

And now a word about frustration. The Bob Marley post attracted a lot of interest right from the start, but it was pretty annoying to see only a trickle of visitors to my later “Homage to Jack Kerouac”, a guy who after all spent all that time “On the Road” and was thus perfect for trekking around the planet on GE. To my enormous relief, the weeks of work I put into rewriting his biography and pasting it in bits into no fewer than 158 separate placemarks from Marin County to Morocco gradually began to pay dividends, and to date 251 folks have had a look.
I refuse to be at all disheartened, however, by the minimal traffic on my more recent biographies of the painters Paul Cezanne and JMW Turner, which must be among GE’s contenders for least interest for the most amount of work invested. The former, with 48 placemarks, has had 31 visitors; the latter, with 58 locations, has had nine. Art does not seem to go over well at Google Earth, even when you can click on the images of the paintings at each spot and see monster-size version of them.

Anyway, third most popular among my posts was a map overlay of Phi Phi Island, but although this is just a simple tourist guide, I’m sure the tsunami’s hammering of the Andaman Sea resort islet had a lot to do with the 344 downloads. A similar map of nearby Phuket, another Thai destination popular with foreigners, drew 109 views.
Tourism no doubt also added to the interest in my maps and tours of Phnom Penh (283 downloads), Ho Chi Minh City (241), the ancient Siamese capital of Ayutthaya (238), the Chinese territory of Macau, pictured here (232) and Shanghai (227).
Among other greatest hits, 173 people had a look at my photo overlays of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and 169 a placemark showing where zoologists found a veritable “Eden” of previously unknown animal species in New Guinea in February. But then there were the 187 who wanted to see the ex-Soviet carrier Minsk parked outside Shenzhen, China, and the 126 lured by “Really low jet, Canada” (my first and almost certainly last planespotting post). These are the gearheads who make up a good chunk of the population at Google Earth.
Seven comments and 183 views greeted “Britain’s highest resolution yet?”, but we all quickly agreed that my placemark indicating picnickers in Bristol was nowhere near as sharp as anything in Southend, England.
There were 153 downloads of “See the zoo, eat the animals”, about Thailand’s new Chiang Mai Night safari, where it was initially suggested lion meat could be on the menu as well as on view, and another 108 people wanted to find out about “Murder in Samui, Thailand”.

Of less interest to forum browsers but still topping the 50-download mark: Penang Island overlay for tourists (85 downloads), Cambodia’s Killing Fields, with the monument seen in this photo (84), “Lovely view in Phuket” (78), “Rotten manor house – someone please help this man”, about an English baron down on his luck (76), “The world’s smallest mammal”, a bat discovered in Thailand (75), Pyinmana, the new capital of Burma (74), an overlay of Cambodia’s Angkor temple complex (74), overlays of Blenheim Palace in England (69), Thailand’s Naga Fireballs (67), “Spooks of the English North” (67), “Celebrity getaway”, a hotel in Phuket, (58), a 1917 map of Bangkok (55) and a historic view of Hong Kong (54).

What else? In Thailand, my very first post, last October 4, was “Handlebar highway, Bangkok”, seen in the image at the top of this ramble, just some road spaghetti a few miles from home. It’s understandably had all of 14 downloads, but that’s more than the headquarters of my newspaper, The Nation, got (eight).
Then there were “Proposed Suvarnabhumi City” (47), a map overlay of Khao Yai National Park (39), Thamkrabok, the temple for drug addicts (34), Suan Pakkard Palace (33), Phuping Palace (33), Chiang Mai Zoo (27), Wat Thammongkol (20), the Heroine’s Monument in Phuket (19), the Paknam Incident of 1893 (18), two high-rise restaurants (18), Wat U-Mong (10) and, last and deservedly least, the main offices of Kasinkorn Bank (six) and the Bank of Ayudhya (five).

Elsewhere in Asia: A Vietnam map overlay (49), an alternative aerial photo of Shanghai’s old Longhua Airfield (45), a look at Vietnam’s Cu Chi tunnels (34), the headquarters of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong (28), a glimpse of Shanghai’s Jewish history (25), the spot in Malaysia where people have seen Bigfoot (23), the Cao Dai religion’s main church in Vietnam (16) and a pair of hotels in Penang (11 and six).

Earlier this month, coincidentally just before the Oscars, I came across a website with a virtual tour of famous places in Hollywood, with a LOT of interesting history. But the only real interest my 10 posts generated at GE was in “sex”: Hollywood’s Sex Walk of Fame, where porn stars immortalise various appendages in cement, was the clear leader, snagging 52 downloads, followed at 16 by Mae West’s Hollywood home.
The whacky stuff that used to go on at the Hollywood Athletic Club (above) drew a mere four hits – should have promoted that one better, I think. The others: The Pantages Theatre (16), the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (15), KTLA Studios (11), Hollywood’s Rock Walk (10), the El Capitan Theatre and the Knickerbocker (nine each) and the Highland Gardens Hotel, where Janis Joplin died (four).

I’ve given loads of attention to my homeland, Britain, and curiously, my busiest posts have been a map overlay of my hometown, Burnley, with 37 downloads, and a 1610 map of Lancashire (35).
The others: Burnley 1890 survey map (26), a multi-locale tour of Bronte Country (21), Sylvia Plath’s last home and grave (15), the Mary Queen of Scots House, pictured above (15), Dunsop Bridge, the centre of Britain (12), Heptonstall in Yorkshire (11), Marble Hill House in Twickenham (11), Malham, Yorkshire (10), the Florence Nightingale Museum in London (nine), Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight (nine), Burnsall, Yorkshire (eight), Bolton Abbey (seven), Ted Hughes’ birthplace (seven), and then a slew of other Yorkshire spots, Ebolton Hill (six), Barden Tower (six), Rylestone (five), Harewood House (four) and Skyreholme (three).

And finally, some miscellaneous stuff: 30 Patagonia’s dino-croc (30), Sesame Street in Lowell, Massachusetts (23), the mastodons of illinois (19), Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont home (nine) and historic Ithaca, Greece, just three piddling visits for the dozen placemarks involved. (Audible sigh.)