Google announced this morning that geotagged YouTube videos will now be viewable in a featured content layer of Google Earth. The company quietly added the ability to easily associate a geographic location with your videos at upload over the summer. At least in my part of the world, there's quite a few videos that have been geotagged already. This new layer sounds like a lot of fun and could be quite an educational experience as well, depending on video selection (see below).
As far as I can tell video is not yet integrated with Google Maps, so that would be the next logical step. Video is one of the most compelling mediums in existence and its inclusion in local search could really bring some zing to a search field everyone expects to be huge. Google Earth is likely another service with the bulk of its impact still far ahead of it.
The company didn't discuss whether there was any kind of filtering of the videos, though up until now there has been little incentive for video spammers to geotag their content. Now that geotags will take on a new relevance for searchers it will be interesting to see if existing filtering tools or perhaps simple popularity will be sufficient criteria to vet this content for inclusion in Google Earth. YouTube cynics who think nothing on the site is worth watching should spend some time on the community filtered StumbleUpon Video.
The Google Maps team says the YouTube layer is similar to its Google Book Search layer added in August.
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