About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

ArcGIS 9.3 JavaScript API is now available. The two extensions that were also released at the same time were ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for the Google Maps API and the ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for the Virtual Earth. For more information on this free API, visit the ArcGIS 9.3 Resource Center.

Do you prefer GIS or Surveying? Apparently, a retracted article – due to legal jurisdictions – on GIS versus Surveying for Professional Surveyor Magazine caused quite a buzz. The article revealed continued tension and misperceptions between both GIS and Surveying communities. David G. Smith, a GIS practitioner, states, “One basic thing that we all need to come into reckoning with is that Surveying and GIS overlap, but that neither is wholly contained within the other, and that each has areas which may additionally be mutually exclusive from the other.”

Google is on the move. Now pedestrians can view their walking directions on Google Maps. Presently, the company’s existing maps are only good for driving directions. Use of this tool will be popular for major cities, especially those with one-way streets.

Known as a library for mapping APIs, Mapstraction allows the development and construction of mashups supported by major mapping providers such as Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. The tool offers many features such as building a map where the user has an option to see the end result on either of the supported mapping providers, tile layer support and demos.

Have you heard of a Twitter conversation map? Well Walter Rafelsberger from MODUL/University Vienna/Department of New Media created just that. With the use of GeoNames, he was able to reveal the location of Twitter users and generate weather information for the ‘Twitter Weather Map.’

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