m^3

I just opened Google Earth to do a quick search for a cache and I found that the Geocaching KML file didn't work anymore. So I came to the forums to see what I could find out. I've read about 1/2 of this thread including the first several pages and most of the last two or three pages. And I went back and read some of the thread about the Release Notes from 4/21/09. Count me as one of those users who is very disappointed to lose this functionality. While I search for caches in multiple ways, my most common method is to just open up GE and navigate to where I want to look. www.geocaching.com/map provides similar functionality but it's not as good, and I can't simultaneously use the other features that GE has. I think it is sadly amusing that this measure (200 people moving their GE map 500 pans in a day) was translated to "only about 200 users regularly accessed the Google Earth KML" in the official release notes back in April. Of course there aren't many users that pan their GE map more than 500 times per day. This is a ridiculous metric to use. So Raine, can you tell use how many users panned their maps a normal amount, say 30 or 40 times per day?

I've been too busy to do much cacing lately and didn't notice Topozone's demise (as far as I'm concerned) until I tried to pull up some maps last week in New Orleans to do some caching. I ended up caching with just my GPSr and cache description (horrors!) . Now today I'm headed out again and trying to figure out how to get a decent map. Seriously, I much prefer to cache via map, and I hope that mytopo.com's option is made a little more useful and is linked from geocaching.com. I'm a huge fan of mytopo already - I buy their huge (36X48) printed maps on waterproof paper for areas where I cache/explore frequently. So hopefully they'll make their online topo map viewing more useful, like adding an X marking the spot of the search, and allowing various scale and printing options. I'm not likely to ever pay for a online topo map viewing and printing (in small format) service, but I am likely to continue to buy printed maps. So if mytopo.com can provide both services, I'd be very happy.