I just came across Locr, a geotagging and photo hosting tool not unlike Flickr (which I’m not going to review just this minute) but which does have one of the cleverest implementations yet I’ve seen of a Turing Test to keep out automated sign-ups: Asking users to read a Google Maps tile and identify the feature in the middle.

Genius. And it now comes with an uploader for S60 phones like my Nokia N95.

What could possibly justify an 11-day hiatus on this blog? Getting Sweden’s virtual embassy in Second Life out the door in time for an earlier-than-originally-planned press conference with the foreign minister of Sweden, is what. Here are some screenshots of the finished product:

[Scroll down for a geospatial angle to this — it’s not entirely off-topic:-)]

And here is a YouTube video of the press conference and inauguration, which had simultaneous feeds between real-life events in Stockholm and in-world events in Second Life:

(Read more about the geek-fest that was the press conference here.)

You may remember that Ogle Earth posted about Geoglobe a few months ago — Josh Knauer and Stephane Desnault’s virtual inverted globe inside Second Life to which you can post geospatial information. I loved it, so much so that we used it in the virtual Swedish Embassy to pinpoint the locations of every real-life Swedish Embassy, with direct links to each embassy’s web site. Here is a YouTube demo featuring Belmeloro DiPrima, my avatar:

Do come visit us in Second Life. If you’ve never been in, you can get a free account and log on directly via www.sweden.se/secondlife. If you already have an avatar, teleport to the Swedish Institute sim.

[Stefan Lorimer guest-blogs from Google Developer Day 2007. Here is his summary of the keynote.]

Speakers included VP of engineering Jeff Huber, Google data API product manager Paul McDonald, Google Maps and Local Search product manager Thai Tran and Sergey Brin. The keynote speech was broadcast to 10 global cities with 5,000 developers worldwide participating in the conference.

The speech was broken into three major sections: 1) Integrate Google services, 2) Reach Google users, and 3) Build next-gen web apps. Each section featured a product announcement.

For the Integrate section the product announcement was the Google Mashup Editor. It was discussed that AJAX, Javascript, Atom, RSS, caching and parsing on the server were all involved in the process of making mashups. Mashup Editor provides a Sandbox for testing and taking feeds from external sources and creating mashups in as few as 3 lines of code.

There is at this point also the mention of the Gadgets API, which is used in Google homepages for widgets and now will be able to be added in websites. It was also mentioned that ***Gadgets can be added to blogger blogs****. I want a gadget on my blog of a mashup of Frank Taylor’s Google Earth Blog and Stefan Geens Ogle Earth. [:-)]

Next product announcement is Google Mapplets which lets you combine Maps API with Google Gadgets API. This functions by way of an iframe that contains a gadget that inputs data into Google Maps. As a side note, try to implement a Flash app in one of these for some extra bang for your buck. Check out this preview to try it out.

Lastly, there was a mention of Google Web toolkit and the current limits of AJAX.

Picking up on this topic, a new product announcement: Google Gears is demoed, which gives developers offline access for web apps. It is billed as cross-browser, cross-platform and open source, with an evolutionary approach towards working with industry standards. This enables developers to keep using skills that would be based around previous tools such as Javascript API.

It was also brought up that Google Reader would now be functional offline.

Next up an announcement is made of the Gears Industry Collaboration between Adobe, Opera and Firefox. A demo of Flex and Google Gears is given.

[Stefan Lorimer also posted a YouTube video of some new features coming soon to Google Earth:

And here is one of Sergey Brin:

Personally, I’m amazed at how much that was presented at the Keynote has a geospatial component or application. Thanks, Stefan L.!]