Google Earth vertical data display

If you have been to the Google lobby, there is a display showing live internet search traffic patterns on a rotating Google Earth. Locations with more vertical dots represent more traffic.

Also, the dropbox guys just posted a video of dropbox traffic i开发者_JAVA百科n a similar fashion. http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=339

Looking through the Google Earth docs, it's not obvious that this display view is possible out of the box so I'm wondering if anyone else on SO has tried similar experiments and would be willing to share how they did it.

It indeed isn't possible out of the box, but you can use extruded polygons to imitate the effect:

http://kml-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/interactive/index.html#./Polygons/Polygons.Extruded.kml

You can also show 3D models or icons/placemarks at any point in space, if you'd prefer a more 'particle'-like visualization.