Slashgeo

National Geographics runs a story on GeoRSS named disaster prediction, social networking boosted by geo-data feeds. From the article: "Singh, a staff member at the nonprofit Open Geospatial Consortium, says that the GeoRSS service will extend the capability to create such location-based tags—a concept known as georeferencing—to anyone with an Internet connection. [...] "GeoRSS, by providing an easy and easily agreed-to data format, would enable greater sharing of crucial information on the ground," he said. Now it is up to software companies to incorporate the standard into their products. Already industry giants Microsoft and Yahoo! have taken an interest, Singh says." See our previous related stories below.

The Memory Link offers a short entry on the localization of journalism and the ties with geospatial technologies. It links to this Frontline article about hypoerlocalization of newspaper: "The second thing that's happened at the Tribune and at the L.A. Times in particular is that newspapers around the country have figured out that what you have to do today to survive is provide local news coverage. People want to read about what's going on in their own communities, and the Web usually can't provide that. The Web can tell you what's going on in Iraq; the Web can tell you what's going on in Washington, D.C. It can't tell you what's going on in Des Moines if you live in Des Moines." This article seems to completely miss the point about the geo-enablement of the web. See related stories.

This Ogle Earth entry discuss the difficulties of the automated mapping of geospatial blogs news items. Here's the link to the Google Earth placemark. From the blog: "In sum, I think that in the automated post-processing of blog content is not nearly as effective as the pre-processing of content [...] The main unsolved challenge is dealing with multiple relevant locations in one post. It's not something that GeoRSS is really set up to handle, as far as I can see."

The import cartography blog links to the announcement of Google Maps API's support for GeoRSS feed and KML mapping. Surprisingly, the official blog takes Slashgeo's GeoRSS feed as example (thanks Nigel)! Too bad we haven't completed the work on our GeoRSS Feed (example: non-main page geolocated stories are not yet included in our GeoRSS feed). From the announcement: "To start we now support GeoRSS as a data format for geographic content in Google Maps. We want to enable users to create data in whatever format is most convenient for them, and feel that by supporting both KML and GeoRSS we can enable a wider variety of people and applications to contribute content to Google Maps. We've built support for the Simple, GML, and W3C Geo encodings of GeoRSS -- all you have to do is enter the full URL of a GeoRSS file into the Maps query box to load the file." Obviously, the official GeoRSS blog covers the story. Links to other GeoRSS-related stories below.

serosero writes "The GeoNames webservices are now avaialable for the thousands of Drupal (Open Source Content Management System) users with the GeoNames API for Drupal. All XML-based services are supported by the API, and the information is conveniently available through a standardized function."