Panoramic Earth hits 3200 Panoramas

Panoramic Earth has just passed a landmark of 3200 fully interactive 360 panoramas from all around the world. With recent added pictures from the very northern areas of New Zealand, including around Cape Reinga, and other parts of Northland, this global guide continues to grow. Pictures from Australia, especially from around Victoria and South Australia, are also regularly added to the site and the number of contributing panoramic photographers has also grown. As always, these beautiful panoramas are linked to Google maps and are accompanied with local descriptions.

Panoramic Earth continues to make these tours available to other websites to use as embedded content. So, if running a virtual tour from parts of New Zealand, Australia or any other featured place in the world is of interest to you, then check out the site's Use a Tour page. Below is an example tour based around Doubtless Bay, a rugged and beautiful part of Northland in New Zealand.

Doubtless Bay tour provided by Panoramic Earth. All rights reserved.

New York Guide and Map

New York 360 panorama (c) Peter Watts - all rights reserved

With over 100 panoramas of New York providing an interactive guide to the city, Panoramic Earth continues to expand it's coverage of the USA. New York is one of the most visited travel destinations in the US, and a major entry point for visitors from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people travel here from Europe every year for the shopping, eating and world famous sights. Panoramic Earth's guide and map of New York covers many of the well known sights, as well as parts of the city not so frequently promoted to tourists.

New York 360 panorama (c) Peter Watts - all rights reserved

Each panorama is linked to a Google Map of New York and accompanied with some local and travel information. This allows you to see where you are, what is there and how to get there in one easy, interactive step. For a full list of the New York 360° panoramas available see the New York Panorama Index on Panoramic Earth. As with the other tours on the site, this New York guide can be embedded within 3rd party sites. See the Use a Tour page for more information.

Google Chrome Slow Takeup

Since it's launch earlier this year it seems that, even with the huge power of Google to promote things, the take up of Google's own browser, Google Chrome, has been quite slow. Panoramic Earth has seen the use of Chrome grow to only 0.67% of it's visitors in the last few months. In addition to this the browser seems to sometimes have problems loading up Google maps at first, though this is resolved when the page is refreshed.

Most of the comments thus far on the web about Google Chrome come from Fire Fox users who have taken a look. They seem pretty unanimous in agreeing that it is a faster browser and, while taking more memory to run when first open, does not suffer from memory bloat like other browsers. However, they also seem pretty unanimous in thier disapointment that there is, to date, little in the way of Add-ons that make Fire Fox so popular among it's users. Most often noted are those like Ad-Block Plus and Informenter. Therefore it seems that unless and until Google Chrome encourages the use and development by such add-ons by the wider community then this browser is not going to see wide uptake in the near future.