I just saw an article from last weekend’s Financial Times that lauds the use of Google Earth as a tool helping to “speed the march towards a more egalitarian society” in Bahrain.

I know it sounds a bit, well, pollyannaish, but apparently Bahrain is facing an acute housing shortage even while 80 percent of its territory is covered with enormous royal estates and private golf courses and race tracks.

Google Earth upgraded to higher resolution imagery of the island earlier this year, and the government tried to block the site as a privacy measure. This proved an effective way to motivate Bahrainis en masse to check out the aerial views of their kingdom one way or another.

According to Mahmood al-Yousif, a prominent Bharaini blogger interviewed by the FT: “Some of the palaces take up more space than three or four villages,” he said. “People knew this already. But they never saw it. All they saw were surrounding walls.”

The speculation is that the starkly unequal distribution of land so many people saw on Google Earth may affect the outcome of the parliamentary elections on Saturday.

This is a pretty encouraging story about the power of information, you gotta admit, especially for us geophiles. And if you’ve read some of our other posts or visited our website, you might know that FortiusOne is gearing up to release a free community repository for geographic data.

The objective of the repository, along with GeoIQ, is to create accessible geographic information and geo-analytical tools people can use to help them buy homes, locate businesses, and get a leg up on the competition, for instance. But we like to think they might help fight a little injustice or improve environmental stewardship along the way.

So, while we may not ever be able to claim that our web service saved a life, potentially helping to speed the march toward a more egalitarian society will do.

Popularity: 7% [?]

We have previously mentioned here our ongoing work in launching a public geodata warehouse, which will allow anyone to share their geodata with the world, and to use the data that exists in it on their own, whether it’s in GeoIQ or another application.

Without launching into a full blown rant on the various pros and cons of some of the options available for geodata exchange formats, I would like to direct your attention to the poll on the right side of the page (RSS readers, sorry, but you’ll have to load up the full page in your browser).

Please post any comments/questions/initiation of full-blown shout-fests as comments in this post, or, even better, in the GeoIQ Forums.

Read on for a brief description of the poll options available, as well as my quick take on them.  The outcome of this (admittedly very unscientific) poll and the feedback that it generates, if any, will probably play a big part in exactly what, and how much, of the relevant standards and technologies we support initially, so please, don’t hold back!

Technorati Tags: geodata, GML, KML

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Since Sean announced our first public release of the GeoIQ javascript APIs last week, we’ve had a very good response so far, and it would appear that interest is still growing.  So first and foremost, thank you to everyone who has given us feedback and checked out GeoIQ and our example mashups.

But of course, we now have to formalize our plans on what, exactly we’re going to do next.  We have a few things in the works, Sean mentioned our up-and-coming geodata warehouse initiative (a catchier name is also in the works), but there are several other things that are also on the list.

One of the things that we feel very strongly that the ultimate strength of our technologies isn’t in doing things for people, it’s in enabling them to do it themselves.  We’ve come up with some pretty cool stuff, in my own (admittedly biased) opinion, however, the best stuff is still out there floating around in the brains of some very smart, creative people on the fringes of the internet.  And it’s the potential for those ideas that really excites us (that, and non-newtonian fluids).

Read on for the short list of potential projects we’re thinking about in the short term, and an opportunity to give your feedback.

Technorati Tags: API, mashup, yahoo, GeoIQ, google, maps, virtualearth

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Popularity: 15% [?]

After more work than we anticipated, the API and mashup release is ready for Prime Time. The GeoIQ API is now officially available for consumption and you can get all the good information about it at:

http://www.GeoIQ.com

Our GeoIQ Mashups

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Popularity: 15% [?]

As we’ve been working dilligently on our public API release and the rest of the GeoIQ platform technology components, one of the design goals we’re constantly keeping in mind is that everything we do should eventually be accessible through some sort of service architecture.  Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but when I hear “Service Architecture” I usually think of SOAP (then I usually think about what I’m going to have for lunch, and why that spanish-looking guy is sporting a mullet).

That being said, we aren’t exposing anything through a SOAP or XML-RPC interface right now.  But why? 

Technorati Tags: API, mashup, REST

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Popularity: 6% [?]