When you’re getting ready to travel, or go out and about, normally, people want to go where the action is. Granted, there are those of us who want to get away from it all, and vacation accordingly, but there are others who travel the world looking for a good time in the process. Now, thanks to a Google Earth/heat map mashup, planning ahead to accomodate such travel arrangements just got a little bit easier.

The mashup comes courtesy of the Sightmaps project, and according to the Google Earth Blog, the project, “creates a heatmap in Google Maps based on the number of photographs that have been submitted to Panoramio.”

Judging by the finished product, it looks like mainly European users are hip to the ways of Panoramio:

Now, compare that to the United States, which seems to have a concentration of Panoramio users in New York and California. Beyond that, however, not as much:

Other filters that can be added to the Sightmaps mashup include the satellite view, as well as an image view that shows interested users the pictures that have been uploaded from various geographical areas. An example:

There’s even a tutorial showing interested parties how to create their own kind of heat map for Google Earth, just in case you’re wanting to dabble. It should be noted there are also KML files that can be installed, so you can feature the same “filters” on Google Earth.