Ogle Earth shares a plethora of links with everything from a 3-D globe viewer from Microsoft Virtual Earth’s API to heatmaps of georeferenced Panoramio photos to a job search using ReliefWeb’s map of humanitarian vacancies. It really shows that you can use a map for anything.

Reverse geocoding for Google Maps is now available, and Google Maps Mania has a comprehensive review. Reverse geocoding is pretty cool, it allows users to enter in the latitude and longitude of your location and then provide the physical address (for example, FortiusOne’s mailing/street address).

Journalists take note. The AnyGeo Blog points out how important the visual of a map is in telling a story. Reading a recent article in the local Fort Collins, CO paper, Glenn says, “I can’t help to think how much more useful the article in the paper would have been by simply posting the actual map or a link and forget about all the blabber.”

The Click2Map blog gives an overview and insight into the Google Gears Geolocation API for laptop wi-fi users. The original intent of the Gears Geolocation API was for developers to easily deliver location enabled web sites on mobile phones. But the team realized that laptop users could benefit as well, so added that functionality to the product. Even better, the Gears Geolocation API is free.

Popularity: 9% [?]

James Fee writes that The ESRI JavaScript API is better than WebADF. “The simplicity of the JavaScript API and the way it works, makes the classic WebADF and HTML viewers obsolete for most users…”

Jeff Thurston at VectorOne discusses map intelligence and data workflows. While most workflows using a GIS follow a step-by-step procedure, Jeff states that, “no matter how proficient you are with a GIS, or the data in question, it is near impossible to know what else surrounds the question you are working on.” This leads to questions of map intelligence and the procedures and workflows that are related to making a map. To be intelligent, GIS becomes more than just following the process, but processing the information in a meaningful way.

Applications using Yahoo Fire Eagle are highlighted on Google Maps Mania. These applications include Spot, Wikinear, Rummble, Metrosphere, Map My Tracks, and ekit. Each has a different goal in mind, from building a travel journal on Google Maps to list geotagged events happening near you.

We did a lot of work mapping Hurricane Ike this year, providing maps important information such as storm surge and wind speed, wave heights, and the impact on energy infrastructure. GISuser shares that 3-D pre- and post-storm lidar topography data will be made available to local, state, and federal agencies to aid post-storm disaster recovery and future erosion mitigation.

It appears that there is a spatial data exchange in Ireland with multiple agencies contributing data. Directions’ All Points Blog reports that metadata searching is available via text search or accompanied by spatial extent and date, but there is no “map viewer” to examine found live data at this time.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Is the geospatial industry affected by the world’s financial situation? Not as much as you would think, according to Jeff Thurston and Matt Ball of V1 Magazine . Thurston claims the geospatial industry tools are relevant because they are based on reality. Ball states that as long as geospatial technologies serves critical markets (government, homeland security, etc.), the industry can weather out economic downturns. The geospatial industry is innovative in its technology, which drives growth and will certainly provide career opportunities and a bright future for those involved.

Google adds a voting mapplet, offering registered voters polling location information by just entering your address. The developing site will feature voting information in mid-October. Visit your state or location election sites for registration information. Still want more political maps? Check out Electoral College map predictions and John McCain’s geo-biography in Google Earth.

Google Maps isn’t always perfect though. This week, reports on map spamming surfaced, also recent changes to Google Maps (switching from TeleAtlas to NavTeq) is rendering both Google Earth and Google maps incorrectly, according to Chad at Earth is Square.

Nokia 1.5 introduced their new mapping application, Nokia ViNe. The application gives users the ability to add location information to their geo-tagged photos. Nokia Photos uses map data from Navteq through the Maps on Ovi service.

GIS made the front page of the Coloradoan-Fort Collins. The Poudre School District received a small grant to help educate future high school graduates interested in geo technologies. The district will provide two courses for 50+ students to take in either clean energy for companies or GIS technologies.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Google Maps is moving above and beyond with their new mobile offering for Street View. The application now includes a 360 degree pedestrian perspective. Google Map’s mobile version was introduced this week and is available for the Blackberry and other smart phones.

Speaking of Google Maps, Googlers (members of the Google Team) were invited to visit the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to make tools like Google Earth more accessible. The team will be conducting a series of workshops, conducting geography trivia contests and building maps (using Google Maps of course). Could Google be paving the way for mapping education?

Netezza, a global leader in data warehouse appliances and data warehousing, announced their spatial extension to its database. They will support spatial data types and operators (specifically vector data types: points, lines and areas). Netezza’s architecture is intended to work for mass queries and analysis, not operational geospatial applications.

GeoServer introduced their newest version of GeoServer and last release of the 1.6x branch, 1.6.5. The latest update features Dutch translations, and 65 bug fixes and other additional improvements.

Click2Map revealed a new feature for online crowded maps. The auto-cluster feature allows map makers to create a ‘unique marker’ for areas that are densely concentrated. The tool also enables you to laser-tune the display based on three parameters; clustering rate, minimum markers and maximum zoom.

Open Street Map is now available in Shapefile format thanks to some work from the team at geofabrik. With this addition, there is no longer any need to convert the osm.bz2 to Shapefiles as it is now supplied for users.

Popularity: 13% [?]