• Reuters, Friday, October 12, 2007 12:32 PM

YouTube users can now peg videos set in specific locations to maps in Google Earth. So, if you go to Paris and scroll over the Eiffel Tower, a video overlay would pop up containing information about the building. The feature could be a real boon for tourism, enabling would-be travelers to surf the digital globe for information about potential vacation spots. Head to Maui and you might find snorkeling or surfing videos, hotel tours, or information about local wildlife. Producers enable the feature by adding geo-tags to their YouTube videos; Google Earth users will not be able to geo-tag videos.

The new feature could pave the way for a whole new format for local advertising. It's unclear what Google's advertising plan is for the new service, but you'd think a marketer could simply create an ad on YouTube and then geo-tag it for placement on Google Earth--for free.

Incidentally, both Microsoft and Yahoo already allow users of their mapping programs to annotate them with links to Web sites, photos and videos, but YouTube is the Web's largest video sharing site and Google Earth is the most popular 3D mapping program.

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