There are millions of ways that Google Earth can help showcase interesting data, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has found a good one — tracking the progress of migrating Ospreys. They’ve built some nice tools for Google Earth that track the location of ‘Mallachie’ and ‘Rothes’ as they migrate from their nest in Loch Garten, Scotland.

The data was very good, but it seemed like they could have done more with it. Trevesy has taken it upon himself to improve on what RSPB has started. For example, they provide a network link-ready KML file, but then give instructions on how to build the file in Google Earth. Why not just provide the final KML, ready to go? Trevesy did, and here is the resulting file. He also showed them how easily the KML could be displayed as an embedded file using the Google Earth plug-in, as seen here:

This is a neat project for a few reasons. Not only does it show how well Google Earth can display data for projects like this, it’s a great example of how easy it is to take Google Earth data and improve upon it. Trevesy didn’t do anything groundbreaking, but his simple improvements made the data more easily accessible for many people, and presented it in a more interesting fashion.

StreetView Trikes in South Africa: With the World Cup coming to South Africa in 2010, Google has been working hard to cover the country with StreetView imagery. Not only are they using cars, but they’ll be using the cool “StreetView Trike” as well.

As with other countries, they’re asking you to vote for where the trikes should go. World Cup stadiums? Museums? Vote and let them know what you think.

If you haven’t seen the trikes before, they’re quite cool. Here’s a look at one driving around Stonehenge:

10,000 Museums in a Network Link: The folks at Muselius have put together a powerful little network link. Using their database of over 10,000 museums, they’ve created a KML that showcases all of them. You can get the KML file here.

10 things Americans should know about the world: Educational Tours has put together a neat piece that highlights “10 things Americans should know about the world“. They cover things such as where the largest producers of petroleum, our biggest supplier of bananas, etc. For each answer they provide a KML that flies you to that country.

While I’d like to have seen a bit more detail in the KMLs, or even an embedded plug-in that does it all in one shot, it’s a neat way to highlight items in an article like this.