Slashgeo

The Map Room and scrappad, along with Slashdot, discuss the addition of geotagging photos in Flickr. From the official blog: "There are a couple of short video tutorials (or "screencasts") which give the 90 second overview on how to geotag your own photos and how to use all the controls for searching and exploring geotagged photos. [...] But if you just want to jump in and start geotagging, open the new 'map' tab in the organizr and go for it. It's all drag and drop and easy to figure out. Since location information has its own privacy setting -- so you can keep the location the photo was taken private, even when the photo is public -- you'll be asked to set a default privacy setting before beginning."

The Geobloggers blog discuss three 'hidden' Flickr map features. From the blog: "Being mainly; placenames in the URL, microformats and geoRSS, and by ‘Hidden’ I mean ‘less known about or obvious’."

From the geowanking list and almost all geoblogs, the New York Times runs an article on geotagging and web mapping vizualization [registration required or this link]. From the article: "“The value may not be immediately apparent. But 10 years from now, nobody who’s geotagging their photos is going to regret it,” Mr. Butterfield said. “Most people have just one or two or three iconic photos of their grandparents. Now people are going to have tens of thousands of photos, and when that happens, every little bit of context helps.”" This topic has been featured several times on Slashgeo, make sure you read related stories below (see this main story).

The Brain Off blog tells us about improvements of Yahoo! integration of GeoRSS. From the blog: "They have GeoRSS export and polylines in GeoRSS! [...] Yahoo has supported GeoRSS since the beginning of their API, and now giving developers the ability to export their maps into GeoRSS is a great step at encouraging more sharing. However it could go farther."

Green Palolo writes "http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/44454-1.html The Open Geospatial Consortium has dubbed Google’s Keyhole Markup Language – the language used for developing Google Earth – a best practice and is working with Google and other OGC members including ESRI and Autodesk to make sure KML integrates well with such other standards as the Geographic Markup Language. Microsoft — which is continuing development of its Web-based mapping product, Microsoft Virtual Earth — is not currently an OGC member, though it is expected to join soon. Google offered KML 2.1 to the consortium last April and is working closely with OGC in further development of the language. An OGC official said the main advantages of making KML a standard are that it speeds development of Web-based mapping applications, encourages greater interoperability of products and ensures easier movement of data between applications. OGC expects KML 3.0 to be released as a standard early next year." See the several related stories below, this has been covered previously.

Ogle Earth informs us you can now easily show Flickr sets as KML on Google Maps using open source PHP code. From the Adam Franco's blog: "One of the things I (and others) have found lacking when working with geotagged images on Flickr, is the inability to retrieve a “photo set” (Flickr’s take on a slideshow) as a KML document that can then be displayed in GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps, or other geo-browsers. Flickr provides some KML links and GeoRSS feeds, but these are either limited to 20 items or can only be pointed at tags or users’ photo-streams, not a particular photo set."

AnyGeo reports " GPicSync - automatically embed location information in your photos. Some more help for those wanting to geocode their photos - something that isn't always as simple as you would like! This is an interesting application from Google - GPicSync automatically inserts location in your photos metadata so they can also be used with any 'geocode aware' application like Picasa/Google Earth, Flickr, loc.alize.us, etc.""

The Map Room informs us of the launch of Flickr Places: "Today Flickr released two new maps-related features. The new Flickr Places pages will take some of the 30+ million publicly geotagged photos already uploaded and organize them into key themes for over 100,000 locations. Each Places page features interesting photos and photographers, related Flickr Groups, and the tags that make that area unique. The maps page itself gets a great upgrade as well, with an improved world map where people can easily view popular and up-to-date themes." Christian Spanring claims it's not necessarily good news: "Maybe it’s just me, but I think the continent spanning words (tags) on the new Flickr map are a step backwards regarding usability, compared to the really nicely done photo-dots-generalization the previous version of the map had. The only interactivity on the new map is clicking tags, right?" See also numerous Flickr-related stories below.