Online Trick

This is a handy option for displaying Google Maps in Google Earth. This could be any of your own maps created in Google Maps, a route or whatever. One nice feature of GE's Network-Links is that if you or any other contributor of a Google map modifies it (in Google Maps), it will be refreshed also in Google Earth.To do so, just grab the link from Google Maps. Like this one for a route:

https://maps.google.at/maps?saddr=Tivoli+Stadion+Tirol,+Innsbruck&daddr=Haggen,+Sankt+Sigmund+im+Sellrain&hl=de&ll=47.227496,11.250687&spn=0.12007,0.338173&sll=47.230526,11.250825&sspn=0.120063,0.338173&geocode=FagR0QIdYR-uACGQHB8W0fIkjCkfsEUhQ2mdRzGQHB8W0fIkjA%3BFZhY0AId6CypACnvxXqyRz2dRzG6da9r3hgbNA&oq=hagge&t=h&dirflg=h&mra=ls&z=12


Then go to GE and choose "Add" from main menu and "Network-Link" from the submenu. Then paste the above link and append "&output=kml" to it. That's it!

(1) for producing html code for a Google Map with R-package googleVis do something like:

 

library(googleVis)
df <- data.frame(Address = c("Innsbruck", "Wattens"),
                 Tip = c("My Location 1", "My Location 2"))
mymap <- gvisMap(df, "Address", "Tip", options = list(showTip = TRUE, mapType = "normal",
                 enableScrollWheel = TRUE))
plot(mymap) # preview

(2) then just copy-paste the html to your blog or website after customizing for your purpose..

See stand-alone code to produce this map below.

require(RJSONIO)
require(RCurl)
require(plyr)
library(googleVis)

# function to retrieve coords from ip-addresses
# (https://github.com/rtelmore/RDSTK/blob/master/src/RDSTK/R/functions.R)
ip2coordinates <- function(ip, session=getCurlHandle()) {
  api <- "http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ip2coordinates/"
  get.ips <- getURL(paste(api, URLencode(ip), sep=""), curl=session)
  result <- ldply(fromJSON(get.ips), data.frame)
  names(result)[1] <- "ip.address"
  return(result)
}

# read log-file:
setwd(tempdir())
download.file("http://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B2wAunwURQNsZjY4Njc1OTYtYWE3My00ZjNjLTg1YzEtNDNlNmYyYmNiYmI0",
              destfile = "google_docs.csv", mode = "wb")
log <- read.csv(paste(tempdir(),"/", "google_docs.csv", sep = ""),
                header = T, stringsAsFactors = F)

# create dataframe to collect coords:
nr = nrow(log)

Lon <- as.numeric(rep(NA, nr))
Lat <- Lon
Coords <- data.frame(Lon, Lat)

# some will not be found (I will dismiss these rows later):
for (i in 1:nr){
  try(
  Coords[i, 1:2] <- ip2coordinates(log$IP.Address[i])[c("longitude", "latitude")]
  )
}

# append to log-file:
log <- data.frame(log, Lat = Coords$Lat, Long = Coords$Lon,
                  LatLong = paste(round(Coords$Lat, 1), 
                                  round(Coords$Lon, 1),
                                  sep = ":"))

log_gmap <- log[!is.na(log$Lat), ]
gmap <- gvisMap(log_gmap, "LatLong",
                options = list(showTip = TRUE, enableScrollWheel = TRUE,
                               mapType = 'hybrid', useMapTypeControl = TRUE,
                               width = 550, height = 300))
plot(gmap)

... I thought this geocoding-bit might be worth sharing (found HERE when searching the web for dismo-documentation).

library(dismo)

x <- geocode("Bozner Platz, Innsbruck, Tirol, Austria")
e <- extent(unlist(x[4:7]))
g <- gmap(e, type = "satellite")

plot(g)