Yahoo officially opened their experimental geo-location platform, Fire Eagle, to everyone on Tuesday. The location management service enables users to post their positional data on the web. One of the notable features is privacy. Although users are sharing their location, they can set limitations on what location information can be released. Pownce, Movable Type and Outside.in are the three companies currently using the service.

Photo host Flickr announced a new addition to their existing features: geotagging. Users can now drag their photos to a Yahoo Map through a link provided in their profile. Flickr will still offer Organizr, and highly recommends using that tool for batch geotagging. The new feature will be used to easily tag single photos. Check out this link that has Beijing Flickr photos on top of OpenStreetMap based data. Interestingly, the base Yahoo map for Beijing has hardly any road data and no street names.

Russia-Georgia’s war has been mapped. The CatholicGauze has been keeping track of the battle locations as the war progresses. Both Google Maps and Live Maps are covering the battle areas, even though Google has been called out for not finding the correct data for regions in Georgia.

A post from Sean Gillies asks for distinction between “web GIS” and “Geoweb”. James Fee and Andrew commented on the post, saying that “WebGIS” is tools and technology while “geoweb” is a whole other “social web”.

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