Slashgeo

The GeoRSS mailing list announced the release of the GeoRSS specifications version 1.0. From the website: "At this point we have completed work on two encodings which we are calling GeoRSS GML and GeoRSS Simple. GeoRSS GML is a formal GML Application Profile, and supports a greater range of features than Simple, notably coordinate reference systems other than WGS84 latitude/longitude. It is designed for use with Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, although it can be used just as easily in non-RSS XML encodings. GeoRSS Simple has greater brevity, but also has limited extensibility. It can be used in all the same ways and places as GeoRSS GML."

The Map Room tells us Yahoo! AJAX Maps Version 3.4 is here. From Yahoo!: "The latest version of the Yahoo! AJAX Maps API includes performance improvements, numerous new features, bug fixes and a smaller footprint. • Polyline support allows you to draw lines on a Yahoo! Map. • Polylines with GeoRSS can be drawn on the map using the coordinates of your choice. • Local Search is now built-in to the API so that results from local.yahoo.com can be plotted on your map. • Traffic overlay information is built-in allowing you to display traffic information from maps.yahoo.com on your map. • GeoRSS export functionality let’s you export your map application into the portable GeoRSS standard. • An additional 20+ methods, like auto-fitting zoom level when specifying radius."

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.

The Virtual Earth blog announced a major new version of Live Maps has just launched, which includes GeoRSS and Firefox extended support. From the announcement: "Among the new feature items are a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements and enhancements to existing functionality. [...] If you’re running Firefox 1.5 or later or Windows, the VE3D control is now supported. [...] Live Maps is now a GeoRSS publishing tool as well! Collection feeds are GeoRSS compatible, meaning that they have special markup to encode the geographic information about each item in your collection into the feed. [...] This is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that brings maps, travel planning meeting enhancements and a bunch more location based features to Outlook."

The Geobloggers blog announces the support in Flickr for GeoRSS and KML. From the post: "geoFeed: This is the good old fashioned RSS feed, but only of the photos that have location information. [...] Why? You may ask, are you calling it a geoFeed and not geoRSS? Well, I’d say, that’s a good question. And the answer is probably because it’s actually just a RSS feed that includes geo information, in ‘geoRSS’ format and W3C format. [...] In Flickr’s case the KML we’re throwing out is a Network Link, that’s wraps up the actual KML. Each hour, or when you restart Google Earth, it’ll go and get the latest 20 (sorry no more than 20, the next logical step is KML output direct from the API for things like that) geotagged photos." See also related stories below.