Slashgeo

The Live Maps/Virtual Earth blog shortly describes a top 10 features you didn't know about in Microsoft's Live Maps. From the entry: "Put a Collection on your own website: this one is a bit nerdy and isn't entirely specific to the Live Maps website. It's also pretty broad in scope, but super powerful. basically you can publish a map to your website with custom data layers, without having to use a GIS to create the data or know much about. to update the map, you simply edit your Collection interactively at Live maps, and your custom map on your site is automagically updated in real time."

Brian Flood informs us Arc2Earth V2 has been released. Here's the Arc2Earth what is does page, from the overview: "Arc2Earth was created to convert and publish your ArcGIS data to view in Google Earth, Google Maps or Virtual Earth with a click of a button. There are some advantages and disadvantages to using one product over another." See also several previous stories regarding Arc2Earth below.

Correction : The Google Earth Blog actually reported this story yesterday. My apologies to the blog's author.

Ogle Earth reports first about this major VE update. Head on over there for more details, but the new features are :

• Importing of GeoRSS and GPX and.... KML!
• Bird's eye view in 3D
• 3D modelling
• Better search

A longer more detailed list can be found here in the Virtual Earth Developer Forum. Be sure to check out the Sketchup Killer app they bundled with the update. Right click on the 3D globe, and select "Add 3D model". It will install the modelling app at this point. Update: 10/17 13:39 GMT by S : I added a few related stories below. This is really a major improvement of Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Here's another GEB entry on the new KML support in VE. SharpGIS offers a few interesting screenshots. And be sure to read the official Virtual Earth blog entry. Oh, and Microsoft have rejoined the Open Geospatial Consortium, this is great news!

The Digital Earth Weblog discuss the new OGC membership availability for individuals: "* Non-voting participation in the Technical Committee (TC) * Non-voting participation in working groups of the TC. * Can be a Participant in OGC Interoperability Initiatives on an in-kind resource basis, without monetary compensation. If I’m reading that correctly it means you can offer your time and expertise for free, but you cannot influence the outcome when it comes to a vote." And not unimportant, the OGC is requesting comments over its version of KML, you have until January 4th. Related, the Free Geography Tools details a free KML to GPX converter and the S-M-GIS blog shortly discuss the integration of KML in Virtual Earth. A few previous related stories copied below.