Slashgeo

Last week Yahoo! announced Pipes,an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Slashdot discusses it, but doubtlessly more pertinent, the Google Earth Blog and Ogle Earth have entries on how Pipes relates to geospatial technologies. From the GEB: "The full concept may be a little tricky to grasp if you are not a technologist, but in a nutshell it enables you to easily take the output from one Internet site and feed it to another site as an input which then lets you do something new with the data. [...] Google Earth already has some aspects of this in the form of the network link. A network link lets you get the KML from another server somewhere which may tap into other data to provide you with dynamic content in GE" From OE: "For neogeographers in particular this will be something of a big bang, I suspect. How? For starters, Kevin Cheng's examples output GeoRSS by default, and the entire "pipe" is geospatially enabled."

Still catching up last week's stories, several blogs discussed the major Yahoo! Maps facelift. From the official blog: "Bringing the Yahoo! Maps platform in-house gives us numerous advantages, including; global scalability, having more direct control over upgrades, easier integration of new features and user feedback, and a greater ability to improve accuracy." You can get additional information on the following geoblogs: geobloggers, The Map Room and All Points Blog.

Yahoo News reports " SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc has begun publicly testing two Web services that are the fruit of intensive, one-day internal programming competitions the company has been hosting to foster employee innovation.

One of them, MapMixer, will let users take the millions of maps on the Web and overlay them onto the same locations on Yahoo Maps -- creating hybrid maps that work independently of the underlying format or structure of the different maps."

"MapMixer is now being publicly tested and can be found on a link off Yahoo Maps or at http://maps.yahoo.com/mapmixer/. Once on the MapMixer page, users can upload a map in a variety of image formats, including popular types such as .jpeg or .gif."

A month after their previous data update, Yahoo! Maps announced their biggest imagery update since the program inception (via TMR). From the announcement: "While we’ve steadily added new cities around the world every month (over 500 now) since the beginning, we haven’t made as much of a change in the US until today. Our latest release improves both breadth and depth. Going wide, we’ve made big improvements in our wall-to-wall coverage of the United States, improving our back-drop data for a number of complete states, including California, Oregon, New York, the Carolina’s, and numerous other states in the west and midwest." Mapperz also informs us Yahoo Go! 3 Maps in beta has also been updated.