The cliquey Foo Camp was born out of a joke at O’Reilly that they should create a literal “Foo Bar”. The event is held each year at O’Reilly’s headquarters and during the 2006 event (held during August 25-27, 2006) Google organised a flyover photograph for inclusion in Google Earth.

The very high-resolution image shows the “tech superstar” attendees lying around the grass with a simple “Welcome to Foo Camp” sign, but surely it was a missed opportunity for writing messages with human bodies? Of course, if the Google Sightseeing team are invited to next year’s Foo Camp, then we’ll definitely organise everyone to spell out a rude message.

Updated: It turns out that the Foo Campers did draw exciting things in the Orchard, it’s just that only a small part of the image was uploaded to the default Google Earth layer. I’ve created a Google Earth image overlay of the full-sized image (2.28MB).

The Wirefly X Prize Cup was a space exposition held during October 20-21, 2006, that featured all sorts of space related fun including “Live rocket launches, prize competitions, rocket plane flights, jet pack flights, astronaut talks, an entire space theme park on the ground, and much more.”

As part of the event the organisers released lots of Google Earth content, including 3D models and the Google Earth Space Atlas, all of which can be downloaded from the Google’s mini site.

More info: FooCamp wiki on the overflight and Google Earth Blog post on the Wirefly X Prize photograph.

Near Ystrad Mynach in south Wales, we find a fantastic 200 metre long earth-sculpture of Sultan the Pit Pony.

This is the UK’s largest figurative earth sculpture, and although I’m not sure there’s actually much competition for that particular title, Sultan sure is impressive. I particularly like the way his ear sticks right up in the air!

Sultan definitely looks a lot more like a Stallion than a Pit Pony, and as it turns out, this work (by landscape sculptor Mick Petts) was actually named Sultan by the locals – after a famous Pit Pony that used to work in the old colliery.

There’s more info on Sultan at the Caerphilly County Borough Council website.

Thanks to Barrie Parham.

It seems that the LA Times has written a very nice article about us! The article is dated the 7th Jan, and as it’s currently still the 6th in Los Angeles, we suspect it might well appear in Sunday’s print edition too.

So if you’re in LA at the moment, be sure and check it out! Oh, and if you could save us a copy that’d be great too…

Update: The article did indeed appear in today’s LA Times, on the last page of the paper’s West magazine! So, a very warm welcome then to all the LA Times readers who are joining us today for a spot of satellite sightseeing.

We’ve had UFOs and Water Droplets, but never before have we seen an Unidentified Flying Water Droplet!

Even if this is just an area of land that Google hasn’t got the image for, then what happened? How did the satellite miss it? Is there some sort of anti-photography cloaking-device located here?

Conspiracy! Conspiracy!

Via Digg.

Possibly the most ambitious of Dubai’s land reclamation projects, The World is an archipelago of 300 islands laid out to represent countries of the world.

The first developed island is owned by Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher. The $7 million piece of land was gifted to him by Dubai’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and is located in the Arctic (although I’m sure he would have preferred Germany).

There’s various rumours of who owns the other islands, including reports that Rod Stewart spent $33 million to buy mini-Britain.

The entire project is scheduled for completion in 2008, and over in what looks like it might be Spain, we see a boat “spraying” sand to create the island.

Official Website and thanks to Brad, Catherine, alexandrecavaco, Others.