One thing which has always frustrated me about geophylogenies is how tedious they are to create. In theory, they should be pretty straightforward to generate. We take a tree, get point localities for each leaf in the tree, and generate the KML to display on Google Earth. The tedious part is getting the latitude and longitude data in the right format, and linking the leaves in the tree to the locality data.

Among the many ways to display trees, degree of interest (DOI) trees strike me as one potentially useful way to display trees such as the NCBI taxonomy. For background see, e.g. doi:10.1145/1133265.1133358 (or Google "degree of interest trees"). The thing that would make this really useful is if an application was written that, like Google Earth, supported a simple annotation file format.

The latest version of the David and Wayne Maddison's Cartographer module for their program Mesquite can export KML files for Google Earth. They graciously acknowledge my crude efforts in this direction, and Bill Piel's work -- he really started this whole thing rolling. So, those of you inspired to try your hand at Google Earth trees, and who were frustrated by the lack of tools should grab a copy of Mesquite and take it for a spin.