"When people think about Google Earth, they often think satellite imagery.  Yet, since the early days of Google Earth, we’ve been working with local governments and other public sector organizations to add their aerial imagery as well," explains Scott Ciabattari at the Google Lat Long Blog. "Thanks to this data sharing, we’re able to offer our users a more current representation of thousands of communities and a higher resolution view of countless geographic features." 

"With this week’s launch of the historical imagery feature in Google Earth, we’re now able to partner with public sector organizations and other imagery content providers to present users a view of their community or geographic features, such as mountains or lakes, evolving over time," he adds.

Google has set up a couple new sites where potential content providers can get involved. First off is what Google refers to as a "wecome mat" for organizations to share their aerial imagery. But this is really only part of the equation since they offer opportunities for submitting other kinds of imagery. The gateway to all of these can be found at the new site for Map Content Partners, located simply atgoogle.com/mapcontent.

Google welcomes 3D building and digital terrain models, aerial imagery (current and historical), some types of vector data (boundaries, points of interest) and public transit system routes and schedules. Content providers will have to enter a license agreement with Google.Much more information is provided in the FAQ.

He mentions the partnerships the imagery team at Google has made with townships, national governments and commercial imagery providers to develop a comprehensive picture of the globe.

Ohazama writes about how global Google Earth has become. "Google Earth is available in 13 languages and has been downloaded over 350 million times by people from around the world. People tell us that the reason they use Google Earth is because it covers the areas they care about with high resolution detail."

According to his blog post Google Earth covers more than a third of the world’s land surface and half of the world’s population with high definition imagery. He
writes," Google has been able to provide this unique global imagery by partnering with hundreds of aerial and satellite imagery providers around the world."

"From the small town of Castillia, Colombia to National Geographic photographers like Michael Fay, we are constantly working with new content owners to include their imagery in Google Earth."

He points out that Google Earth has been used for serious situations. "It turns out that our global imagery database is helpful for reasons even beyond our expectations: it’s been used in critical humanitarian efforts from the mountains of Pakistan to the deserts of Sudan."