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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It’s been three years since Hurricane Katrina hit and with hurricane season here, it is no wonder why the Lt. Governor of Louisiana, Mitch Landrieu, stated the importance of Google Street Maps to the New Orleans community. The tool offers the people the opportunity to view the progression in New Orleans. For a better perspective on the recovery, visit The New Orleans Index Anniversary Edition: Three Years After Katrina.

The use of GIS for natural disasters is now trickling over to emergency preparedness. The World Vision International, a faith-based disaster aid organization, is beginning to embrace GIS. The main mission of the organization is to ‘overcome poverty and injustice by reducing the impact of natural disasters with area development programs that concentrate efforts with long-term commitment to maximize their impact.’ Because there is a direct correlation between poverty and areas prone to natural disasters, World Vision International will use GIS to help save lives and prevent loss of life.

The Coalition of Geospatial Organizations (COGO) is now official. A meeting was held this week at the ESRI User’s Conference in San Diego, where organization members voted on their new officers. Currently the coalition has 11 organization members including, the Cartography and Geographic Information Society, the GIS Certification Institute and the American Congress of Surveying and Mapping.

Geospatial professionals are integrating with social networks. Apparently, social network creator Ning has about 22 members and is steadily growing in their Geospatial Professionals Network. Fellow professionals are encouraged to join and engage.

Finally, as the Olympics get underway, we want to say good luck to Director of Operations Matt Madigan, who is currently in Beijing coaching the women’s quad sculling team.

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Not only can you drive with Google Maps directions, you can now take a walk with them. Google added walking directions to its Google Maps product today. The walking directions ignore one-way streets and Google Maps tries to give pedestrians the most direct and flat route possible.

Speaking of Google Maps, CNET raises the question of whether or not Google Maps can (and should) be used for good or evil. One argument states that Google Maps helps awful people find you, but the other argues that Google Maps helps you find awful people. Then again, consider the 51 things you aren’t allowed to see on Google Maps. It looks as though some data isn’t as open as we’d like it to be. From government restrictions to personal-privacy lawsuits, there’s just some information that we can’t see on GoogleMaps.

Andy Powell asks, “does metadata matter” in a recent presentation. He provides history on metadata and wonders if his organization is justified in its current focus and significant interest in this area. Is yours?

Having trouble keeping crowdsourcing straight? Check out the many names of crowdsourcing GIS from GIS Lounge. From neography to collaborative GIS, it’s all covered.

WunderMap released a hurricane tracking service this week, which is perfect timing for hurricane season. WunderMap displays the current position, strength and movement of every tropical storm across the world that threatens to become a hurricane, typhoon or cyclone. For more in depth hurricane information, check out these Google Earth files from Hurricane Hunters. The files allow you to watch live hurricane recon missions, or see the results from recent missions.

Will mobile phone companies purchase GIS companies to offer conventional GIS services? It’s not clear now (and obviously won’t be the iPhone), but it will be interesting to see who’s on first. Has GIS really gone mainstream though?

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Going green is taking businesses and consumers by storm. Yet, what is the role of GIS and GPS in renewable energy development? When GIS and GPS partner, they are ‘uniquely positioned to analyze and monitor earth system processes to make certain that renewable power generation sites are optimally sited and that the power that is generated is delivered efficiently.’ Through the development and expansion of the renewable energy sector, GIS and GPS will be able to capture ‘maximal energy creation at the lowest cost for the widest and the most effective impact in a sustainable sense.’

ERDAS is offering geospatial tools to assist with response during the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season. The company helps organizations harness the information of the changing earth for greater advantage. The ERDAS TITAN GeoHubs will allow organizations to ‘rapidly share imagery and vector data to develop a real-time common operating picture by allowing emergency management planners and responders to dynamically publish and consume geospatial data in a permission-based, collaborative online network.’ ERDAS has even partnered with MCH GeoPoints for more capabilities with medical facilities during these emergencies.

The BBC shared their Olympics map that shows where the 2008 Games’s venues are located in Beijing, Qingdao and Hong Kong. The map was created using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API and MapCruncher. There are over 37 Chinese Olympic venues.

With the rise of GIS’s popularity, it’s no wonder that Radiohead decided to use the concept of the system as basis of their new video House of Cards. Released this past Monday, the band shared ‘data that they used to created the video so people could make their own clips to upload to Radiohead’s YouTube group.’ Google Earth and ArcScene are two of the platforms used to create the video.

After the long awaited iPhone 2.0 was released, reviews about the phone’s GPS feature came pouring in. Since the first version of the iPhone lacked this feature and the trends for location based services grew, Apple added Google Maps to the mix. Good idea or not?

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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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