Wow, that’s five whole days without posting. I could plead all kinds of extenuating circumstances, but that would take too long:-) Better to just post all the interesting new stuff from the past week anon:

• Twango is a media-uploading service that you can email files to (including from your mobile phone) and geocode via text in the message body. The results are now available as network links — your own personal ones, and aggregated ones too.

  What’s interesting about Twango is that you can send not just photos or videos, but also sound files (and PDFs, MS Office files, XML, Zip…) I would love for Twango to get native ShoZu support, as that would give me the ability to publish automatically georeferenced podcasts/sound recordings to the web using my phone’s built-in GPS. (A Twango API is coming.)

• There is a new build of ESRI ArcGIS Explorer out, Build 380. James Fee has a series of short posts about it, but is still unimpressed by the app’s KML support. Sebastian Good at It is what it is‘s finds much improved WMS support.
• Devgrind experiments with visualizing calendar data spatially. In this case, iCal data is turned into KML using Ruby (check out the screenshot). None of the original data is geospatial, but KML is proving useful even for non-geographic spatial visualizations. (See also this 3D chart using KML, blogged previously)
• Search Engine Land:
  

  Belgian newspapers that sued Google to be removed from its index are now back in, having agreed to use the commonly-accepted blocking standards that they initially rejected as not being legal.

  Silly Belgian papers. At least now there is a legal precedent for accepting the the existing opt-out methods and standards.

  Just wondering though, will we have a metadata standard in KML for opting out of indexing or caching (as opposed to the robots.txt method)? Is it possible to publish a KML document today and request that Google not show it as a result of a search in Google Earth?

• AIM conversations as Great Circle segments in Google Earth. (Home page, KML file)
• FonFinder developer Rainer Simon is looking at building a Twitter interface for FonFinder, in a follow-up to this post on Ogle Earth.
• Chad at The Earth is Square has a new KML version out of his Mogadishu Refugee migration layer.
• The geospatial components in Yahoo! Pipes get KML output support. This is worth playing more with, when I get the time. O’Reilly Radar has more. I especially like the Kiva Loans by Location pipe example.
• Life in the Fast Lane has an interesting article about the making of emotion maps (like the recent one in San Francisco).
• I’ve been meaning to review HoudahGeo, the new geocoding app for the Mac. In the meantime, version 1.0.5 is out. I still plan to write it up, time-permitting — my initial impression was that while the application’s workflow concept is compelling, it was still a bit buggy. Frequent updates are fixing the bugs, though. (I do wish there was a way of round-tripping the added EXIF coordinate data back into my Aperture photo library, however — something currently not possible. It remains the case that almost all photos in my library do not have coordinate data in their EXIF tags, and I am still looking for a solution that lets me add such data without having to reimport photos.)
• Ascent is a feature-heavy sports-tracking application for the Mac that also outputs to KML. Check out the screenshots. User Bob Rudis wanted to make the application a bit more social, so he has written an AppleScript folder action to automatically upload the resulting KML to a server and then let everyone view it in Google Maps.
• 3DConnexion’s SpaceNavigator now also works with Microsoft Virtual Earth natively (if you’re browsing on a PC), in addition to Google Earth for PC and NASA World Wind for PC. Which reminds me: When will Google Earth for Mac officially support SpaceNavigator? Is it too much to hope for Virtual Earth 2D support in Mac browsers? You could still use SpaceNavigator to pan and zoom, if not tilt and rotate.
• Export Law Blog has an interesting take on the US ban on downloads of Google Earth in Sudan.
• The highly anticipated (at least by me) GeoCommons is launching at Where 2.0 on May 28.
• Mathematica 6, a brand-new version of Wolfram’s uber-application, comes with heaps of interesting demonstrations, some of which are relevant to the Earth sciences. The accompanying free Mathematica Player is not a dedicated geospatial viewer, but it does do all sorts of 3D visualizations well, so it is worth checking out if you’re looking for an interactive geospatial education tools.
• prontosBR.com is a Brazil-centric collaborative sightseeing site, focusing mainly on Brazilian imagery. With links to Google Earth.
• GeoGarage, by France’s Magic Instinct Software, is a new server product for publishing maps and orthophotos to the internet. The sample Flash plugins feel very responsive, and the output is also available via Google Maps and as KML overlays. I don’t know enough about similar products to judge whether the price is a bargain, but GeoGarage is aimed at organizations that would otherwise not have the budget to publish geospatial content.

N95 corner:

• First firmware update for the N95.
• Another example of how the future of blogging is extreme niche blogging: Sami Lempinen’s Mac.sis, “Making Macs and S60 handsets talk”. Then there is also Tommi’s S60 applications blog, which points to an interesting post about various ways to sync Macs and Nokias. Both Tommi Vilkamo and Sami are Finnish, both work at Nokia, and both write a personal blog about their day job in their spare time. Talk about enthusiasm:-)

Word of warning re the posting frequency here these next 4 weeks: It may get mighty sporadic due to looming project deadlines that are going to have to take precedence…