Slashgeo

Phillip Holmstrand writes "I put together something that will allow anyone to run batch geocoding right from their web browser for free. It uses Yahoo's REST Geocoding engine, which will allow for up to 50,000 geocodes per day. The unique piece is that I have put it together so you can basically copy/paste straight from a spreadsheet into the tool to geocode. The results can then be copy/pasted right back into Excel for further use or imported into a database. It also plots the first 100 points on a map."

The Batch Geocoding blog tells us Google now offer batch geocoding too. From the blog: "Well Google has unleashed their own geocoding service, with a 50,000 per key per day limit. They are even offering up street level geocoding in several countries in Europe and Asia."

The Map, GIS News for UK, EU and W indicates Microsoft Virtual Earth now allows UK Address Searching and geocoding.

The U.S. TIGER dataset has been rarely mentioned here before. The Free GIS D&I Geoblog linked to the announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau that the 2007 First Edition Public TIGER/Line will be available in the shapefiles format. What is TIGER? It stands for "Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing" and from the Wikipedia page: "[...] TIGER/Line is a format used by the United States Census Bureau to describe land attributes such as roads, buildings, rivers, and lakes, as well as areas such as census tracts. TIGER was developed to support and improve the Bureau's process of taking the Decennial Census. TIGER data can be used by GIS applications and is available without cost due to the requirement for U.S. Government publications to be released into the public domain." Some related stories below. Update: 01/25 04:42 GMT by S : Humm.. apologies, corrected the story, the data is not yet available, the site say "Starting in January 2008, the Census Bureau will begin releasing TIGER spatial data in shapefile format." but it seems it's not available yet...