Over the weekend I saw this impressive Collection of Sundials featured on The Google Earth Blog. After checking out a few I wondered how many of these locations would be covered by Virtual Earth's Birds eye imagery? Since the Collection of Sundials was represented as a KML file, it was pretty easy to view it at Live Maps - just point to it with the 'mapurl=' parameter like this:

http://maps.live.com/?mapurl=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=887103

Once loaded it was really easy to cruise around to explore each sundial in Birds Eye view. Birds Eye's four distinct looks at each point on earth are great aid in virtual site seeing, especially in this case where many of the subjects range from 15 to 30 feet in diameter. I found that about 80% of the sundials were visible in the low elevation Birds Eye view, including many of the European sites.

SunDial bridge in Redding, CA as seen from the East

Reggio nell'Emilia, Italy

Frank's post on the GE Blog features some other KML Collections that are fun to look at in Live Maps. The easiest way to do so is to right click on each link and copy the shortcut, then paste it on the mapurl parameter as I showed above. The October 07 release of Live Maps was the first to support KML viewing and import to Collections - we're working on an update to this feature area that should make the KML viewing experience even better. We want to keep it light and simple design-wise, while adding support for some of the less used capabilities of KML that we didn't hit in v1. As always, suggestions are welcome and you can email them to me at stevelom at microsoft d com