The “map butcher” answered my plea and built a handy GeoRSS export tool for ArcMap. Check out his post here or go straight to the script on ArcScripts. ESRI might eventually implement a nice, full-featured, professional GeoRSS exporter, but if you want something this year, this is probably your best bet.

How cool is this georeferenced aerial imaging system I originally heard about on Engadget Mobile.
I’ve been holding out on getting an N95 until Nokia includes high-speed data support for the US frequencies, but it’s getting tough…

Being an urban planner by training, here’s a GeoRSS post that warms the cockles of my heart from Jason Birch. I fought hard for polygon support in GeoRSS with municipalities firmly in mind. Jason seems to be a pretty capable GIS geek, as evidenced by the fact that he’s using FME to generate his feed–he probably has the talent to make this work even if he had to code it by hand.
I originally thought GeoRSS would allow assessing and permitting departments, which are traditionally more MIS shops, to participate in geospatial information architectures without having to use “real” GIS software. I still think that will happen soon, but until then it’s good to at least see the type of data they control–building permits–getting out of the intranet and onto the Web.

The big news of the week was Microsoft Virtual Earth’s announcement of a new version of Live Maps, and Google following days later with a new feature called My Maps. These are both ways, put simply, to do heads-up digitizing in a Web browser!
The importance of this is development is hard to exaggerate. For years the consumer marketplace has done street mapping extremely well. But that was just streets. “Real” GIS folks need to overlay data from various sources, right? Then last year OpenLayers let you have the best of both worlds, overlaying any arbitrary WMS on top of a Google Maps base map. With the merger of OpenLayers and Community Mapbuilder, expect to soon see a Google Maps base map under your choice of WMS and WFS services and/or embedded GML data, styled with SLD and all wrapped up in a nice KML or Context document.
Add to this the ability to create geographic content in your Web browser and access it via a URL, and a very interesting vision of Web-based GIS begins to emerge. It’s a vision that’s very different from the one the GIS conference circuit has been giving us all decade. I could expound on what I think that vision is, but that’s not really important. The most interesting thing I see here is that the architecture is so beautifully loosely-coupled that there is room for everyone’s vision to be realized. One thing I will predict is that the truly interesting time for Geo-startups begins now.

p.s. Does anyone else find it odd that such a major new feature was introduced by two pretty big companies in the same week? Coincidence, or something else? Please Adena get some dirt on this! inaccurate statement, see comments –Raj

As many know by now, OGC is working to bring KML into the international standardization process. There’s a public mailing list for interested parties to discuss what they would like to see in an OGC KML, but I’d like to spend a second on the legal aspect, which is just as important. Here’s a post I just made on the GeoRSS mailing list:

And one crucial point that I think a lot of people miss is the legal intellectual property aspect. Bringing KML into OGC isn’t just about what features end up in that XML format. It’s just as much about making sure the format is royalty-free to use forever. We all know the Google mantra is “don’t be evil” (and the people I know there completely live up to the mantra), but OGC standardization means you don’t have to take their word for it.

So by standardizing KML in OGC, even if people don’t get all the features in there they may like to see, at least you will know you can build innovative applications and information services around KML without fear of getting a cease-and-desist in the mail some day.