Another month, another image update! Frank at gearthblog.com seems to have been first to spot that there’s new imagery in Google Earth, which has now been confirmed on the Latlong Blog.

Currently unavailable in Google Maps¹, the new imagery includes:

• USA: San Diego, San Francisco metro area, Wenatchee (WA), New Mexico.
• Canada: Quebec, New Westminster (BC).
• England: Bristol
• Spain: Barcelona, Costa del Sol, Granada, Murcia, Valencia, Cuenca, Toledo, Caceres, Zaragoza.
• Portugal: Braga, new base imagery for entire country
• Italy: Rome, Naples
• Germany: Freidburg, Munich
• Australia: Brisbane, Great Barrier Reef
• Taiwan: Taipei, Taichung
• New 2.5m base imagery for: The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Taiwan, Tasmania, and parts of Mexico, China, and Australia.

Found anything amazing on the new imagery? Then let us know!

Today we’re extremely proud to be launching three new translations of Google Sightseeing: Dutch, German and Spanish!

These three new blogs join our successful existing translations of French and Italian, so you can now come sightseeing around Google Earth with us in 6 different languages.

We have three new authors who will be translating all the best posts from the English language GSS for their own languages, as well as posting some of their own language specific stuff as well.

See our very first Press Release for more details (which is, naturally, available in 6 languages).

Eventually we’d like Google Sightseeing to be available to everyone, so we plan to expand into even more languages in the future - if you’re fluent in another language (especially any of the languages offered by Google Earth) and would like to have your own Google Sightseeing blog then please get in touch.

And so, we come to end of our first ever desert week. It turns out that we only featured two actual deserts over the week, and we even failed to mention the world’s largest desert!

Despite these we think it’s been a success, but we’d to hear your feedback. Did you enjoy desert week? Do you wish it had been longer, or perhaps shorter? Are there any other theme weeks you’d like to see? Let us know your thoughts!

Here’s the list of all the places we featured this week:

• The Namib Desert
• Sand Tornado
• The Great Dune of Pyla
• The Desert of Maine
• The Atacama Desert

Many of you sent in some great desert based suggestions of other sights to see, but we just didn’t have enough time to feature them all. However, deserts aren’t restricted to desert week, so we may sneak a few in during the coming months.

We’re also planning for August to see the return of the popular Island Week for its third outing, and after that Volcano Day is due to make its triumphant return after a 2 year hiatus, and this time it’s going to make the jump to a fully-blown Volcano Week. Know of any great sights for either event? Then get submitting your suggestions!

Last week, we celebrated Street View’s first anniversary with our Top 10 unseen posts. Google have now joined in the celebrations by adding a massive 37 new areas.

All the new areas are still US based, but the update does include 10 parks for you to explore. The updated imagery also magically erases the street view car, so you can look down and see the virtual ground beneath your virtual feet.

See the best Street View sightings in our Street View category and if you spot anything cool then let us know!

The newly released Google Earth Web Plugin allows you to access the 3D globe of Google Earth, right within your browser.

You can give it a go right now as we’ve enabled the Google Earth mode on our map page¹. Let us know how you get on in the comments.

You can read more about the announcement on O’reilly and Google Earth Blog.

Just over a month since the last update Google have announced new imagery for Google Earth and Google Maps.

The full list of what’s new is available on Google Lat Long.

If you’d like to be kept bang up-to-date with news stories like this, why not subscribe to our twitter feed, where we’ll also be posting the best of the other sights that didn’t quite make the cut for the main site!

Get suggesting those new sights!

Yesterday Google released an updated version of Google Earth for PC, Mac or Linux.

Google Earth blog has posted a video highlighting some of the new features, which include:

• Day/Night mode showing the local time sunrise and sunset.
• Street Views in Google Earth.
• Photography dates (finally! Although, sadly not for all imagery).
• Faster loading 3D models.
• Flash support on Mac.

Download Google Earth 4.3.

It’s almost unbelievable (so much so that we missed it by a week), but Google Sightseeing just turned 3 years old! All the way back on the 6th of April 2005 our first post was Disney World, followed closely by the Hollywood Sign. We think our posts have got slightly better since then… but even so, nobody would have thought that three years later we’d still be going strong, least of all us.

In the past year we’ve successfully added a great new writer Rob Witherow to the team¹, launched our iPhone specific site, and we’ve even branched out into multi-lingual Google Sightseeing with Google Sightseeing Français and Google Sightseeing Italiano; written by Julien Gremillot and Alexei Popov respectively.

As always there’s plenty more to come in the next 12 months:- we’re planning to launch even more translations of the site; we’ve got some new features that we’re just putting the finishing touches on at the moment; and of course we’ve got loads of cool new sights to show you once the most recent imagery hits Google Maps (it’s currently Google Earth only, and we like to wait until everyone can see the latest sights right in their browser).

Plus of course there’s about 300 cool things on the never-ending to-do list we’d like to implement - some of which we’ll get round to eventually

Finally, a huge big thank you to every one of you that reads and comments here - it wouldn’t be possible without your continued support, and it’s great to still be here!