Knowing about better pictures Google Maps & Earth

If you blog about geographic locations, or add Google custom maps to your blog, then it can be very helpful to know when the satellite photos for a certain area are updated. Among other things, this is a reminder to check your map for any details that have changed.

Google's new Follow Your World service tells you just that.

In short, you sign up with your google account, and register to get email alerts when new images for a specific point are availabe in Google Maps or Earth.

Unfortunately you need to select on specific point, not an area, so there's a risk that you might miss updated if you're just a few metres out. But it's beta at the moment, so this may change in future

I haven't seen an official announcement, but it's mentioned in this post on the latLong blog