Slashgeo

Slashdot discuss the launch of Yahoo! Local News. The Slashdot summary: " Yahoo! News front page added local news today. Available for logged-in users right on the front page, local news are also delivered at location-specific URLs." This service is available for US citizens only right now.

The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog discuss the scarcity of geo-enabled blogs. Andrew Turner shortly discuss Geospatial Content Management Systems. Meanwhile, there are related stories about geo-enabling Drupal, WordPress. And since I'm not good at keeping secrets, we're working on geo-enabling slash. From the GSWB: "Geotagged blogs will enable web search engines to effectively index blogs based on geographical information. This information will help to build more powerful search engines that support spatial queries (e.g., find all blogs on the topic “war” and written by people who are located in “Iraq”)."

Vector One offers an article named Newspaper Publishers Need to Learn to Think Like GIS Professionals. From the article: "Most newspapers are sitting on a pile of extremely valuable, and useful information - their records. All the many years of professionally gathered and written material is a veritable gold mine. But for agencies who are attached to the here and now (i.e. N-e-w-s) then it is kind of like being unable to see the forest for the trees. Ask any map or GIS professional handling spatial data, cadastral, thematic, environmental or otherwise, and they will immediately point to the value of databases and records. This is how old and new information is analyzed and compared and used to build the future, be it land management, transport systems or crime behaviour. [...] When mentioning geographic information systems (GIS) I am thinking not only of maps for articles, but the actual spatial relationships of information news in a temporal way." Related stories copied below

Map Hawk links to the abstract of a newly available study on GIS in journalism. From the abstract: "The indepth-interviews revealed factors that will influence the diffusion of GIS, including the availability of map data, competition between media agencies, the ease of getting management to buy GIS once its functionality has been demonstrated to them, and the general use of secondary GIS products. The Web survey showed that 63% of the reporters were aware of GIS but only 11% of the reporters surveyed currently use GIS." You must pay to go beyond the abstract.

Spatial Sustain shares a generic NYTimes editorial named Map Upon Map: New Dimensions in What Maps Can Do. From the editorial: "It’s easy to assume that the real revolution in mapping is the global positioning satellite and Google revolution — the ability to pinpoint yourself in real time on a digital map using G.P.S. technology and to move effortlessly around the globe, at increasing levels of detail, as you can in Google Maps and Google Earth. But the real revolution lies in the layering of data onto these already kinetic methods of viewing the world. In a very real sense, the virtual planet becomes our index to what we know about the actual planet." Related to the hyperlocalization of news, APB mentions NPR being confident about succeeding at providing hyperlocal media. See also related stories below.

All Points Blog informs us the new local news website YourStreet is launching today. From the how it works: "YourStreet transforms the way you experience local news by indexing and mapping thousands of articles, blogs, and conversations down to the street level. YourStreet connects you to the local information that impacts you most – what’s going on in your town, your neighborhood and even your block. YourStreet scans thousands of newspaper sites and local blogs each day to bring you the most comprehensive local news available anywhere." I copied below the several previous stories on similar attempts at hyperlocalizing news.

Here's an interesting map mashup using Yahoo!Pipes linked to on AnyGeo Blog. From the write up: "The app grabs news from google news (yes indeed, GISuser.com news gets crawled by this news crawler - a great benefit of getting your news listed here) and displays on the map where you can then scroll through the results, view a synopsis and click-through for a full read if the caption looks interesting."

This reminded me of another news application called newsmap that aggregates google news, visualizing stories in boxes proportional to the amount of coverage they are receiving using a treemap algorithm. Very cool. Now if someone could only combine both concepts: amount of story coverage and georeferencing to a news app...

Ahmed Adam writes "I just put up an early beta of webmapp.com, a social news site with a local focus. Users can submit, comment on and rate news stories, articles or websites, but every item must be accompanied by a set of coordinates. Visitors are only shown items that fall within a user specified region. There's also a georss feed for each section." See also related links below: several news services now have geospatial features.

The Geowanking list links to an interesting 12-pages Wired article named The whole Earth cataloged: how Google Maps is changing the way we see the world [pdf, 1.75Mb]. The second part of the article is focusing on hyperlocal. From the article: "Today the power still lies in the hands of the mapmakers. The only difference is that we’re all mapmakers now, which means geography has entered the complex freefor- all of the information age, where ever-more-sophisticated technology is better able to reflect the world’s rich, chaotic complexity." This clearly reminds me of Ambiant Findability.

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 Google Earth Blog informs us of CBS offering their News in Google Earth in a convenient manner. From the blog: "They put a lot of stories in the same city (Washington, DC, NYC). Now when you click on placemarks on the same city they spread out into a star pattern allowing you to see all the stories from that location. By the way, the news stories are usually accompanied by nice relevant photos and a link to more details. Often video accompanies the stories once you go to their web page. Very professional multimedia content."

The Google Earth Blog details iCommunity.TV, which geolocate new using Google Earth. From the blog: "Each video or channel is georeferenced and shown with a Google Map, or you can download a "KML" to view the location of the news in Google Earth. The channels are network links and can be saved for future viewing in GE. You can also get RSS feeds for the same information."