During the ‘05 Tour de France, Google-Earth offered up a new and, well, pretty amazing way to check out the route’s detail - you just had to be willing to spend some time finding the towns and roads along each stage. Thanks to a Tour fan who mapped out every stage of the ’06 Tour in Google Earth, searching for the route is a now a thing of the past. In addition to the more obvious points-of-interest – like start and finish lines – each stage also identifies the location of sprints, as well as climbs and their level of difficulty.

While the map feature alone will appeal to most Tour fans, the creator of the route map is encouraging others to join together in a sort of Tour de France social-networking mashup that would integrate geo-tagged photos and movies from the likes of Flicker, YouTube, and Google-Video. He is also hoping that someone – like the racing teams themselves…hint…hint…nudge…nudge – will offer up real time rider telemetry. We've seen some of these features used within Google Earth for things like flight tracking and expanded local detail (like National Geographic's "Africa"). If the Google Earth Tour project reaches its full potential – which we truly hope it does – it could offer up an entirely new way to experience details of the Tour without actually being there. Stay tuned…

Read [via Google Earth Blog]