I’m flying over Nevada trying to find Las Vegas. Even though Vegas is generally considered a major metropolis, I seem unable to pinpoint its whereabouts and spend my time instead drifting aimlessly across bleached deserts and rusty mountains until I eventually stumble onto Reno where I stop and consider wistfully where Johnny Cash shot that man, just to watch him die.

It is of course possible that nobody - maybe not even Johnny - knows exactly where this callous, yet apparently whoop-worthy incident took place, or maybe it’s just that the Google Earth community groupies haven’t got round to placing a little blue ‘info’ icon on the crime scene yet. It’s not as though they haven’t been busy. How else would I have discovered the location of K-Marts regional distribution warehouse? And didn’t you always wonder which rooftop supports the Volkswagen Beetle that’s been turned into a giant black spider?

Now, like lots of people, I am both in love with and a little bit scared by Google. They are currently the main player in the TMI (Too Much Information) revolution. Just when you thought you knew a bunch of stuff, along they come with a dumper truck filled with more, some of it containing detailed information about you and your friends’ personal browsing habits. Not satisfied with being the worlds ‘goto guy’ for information, they have launched Google Earth to enable us to visually browse anyone’s backyard on the planet. “Hmm, I see George Michael keeps his topiary well-manicured!”

None of this detracts from the fact that Google Earth is possibly the most important piece of software in the last decade. Zooming and tilting and flying around the globe, you can’t fail to see the possibilities that it could deliver to both society and businesses alike. But after a while it does all seem just a little bit…well, overwhelming. I mean, the world is still, in human terms, quite a big place. Couple this fact with the location of every coffee shop in existence and you can see that choice has its drawbacks.

“But Kirk, you primate”, I hear you say; “Don’t you understand the concept of layers?”

“Yes”, I reply confidently. But inside I worry that even in its relatively juvenile state, Google Earth is groaning with its burden of ‘ant facts’ and that’s before the corporations start treating it as a proper informational tool.

Enter British Airways, who have leapt into the fray to commercialise the application with a set of their own layers, one of which places the BA logo in the top left-hand corner of the screen. I really like that sort of casual, “You know, we made this”, attitude that good logo placement can achieve.

BA has a dream that Google Earth will become a conduit to their customers and have gleefully scattered a thousand ‘red bed’ icons around the planet, which when clicked…well, show us a picture of the hotel’s roof and open a browser page on BA’s existing website illustrating a list of hotels in the nearby area (*Spoiler* This can also be achieved by typing a location + hotels into Google Search).

So what have the world’s favourite airline really brought to Google Earth's party? A bold commercial first step into the ultimate visual search engine, or another story about how a tool for knowledge becomes a pimp for product placement?

Hopefully it’s the former and maybe soon the community and the corporations will get together and show me the best hotel to stay at in Reno whilst visiting the site where Cash’s unknown victim stood his last.

Kirk Ewing is Managing Director of Traffic Games