A disadvantage of living in Cairo is that The Economist doesn’t arrive at newsstands until Monday, Sunday if you’re lucky. Fortunately Tech Consumer points the way to the online edition of this week’s Economist Tech Quarterly insert, whose leader article is one of the best overviews I’ve read of the geoweb, neogeography, virtual globes, mashups, and the security and privacy implications. There’s references to Snow Crash and copious quotes from interviews with Google Earth’s Michael Jones and John Hanke and Microsoft Virtual Earth’s Vincent Tao: The world on your desktop. It is free to read without a subscription (at least for me, at the moment).

That this article should appear just now and so prominently in a newspaper with a large readership in the business world is a bit uncanny, given this week’s revelation that Google Earth Free has become a legitimate tool for use at work. All those CEOs calling their CTOs asking why they don’t have Google Earth installed on their corporate laptop can now be told there is no legal reason why not:-)

While there’s not much news in the article for those who have been reading the geoblogs closely these past few years, for everyone else this is a lucid and penetrating introduction to the geoweb. If your mother has been wondering what precisely this geoweb is and has been complaining how she doesn’t understand any of it, send her the link to this article. I have:-)