I’ve been letting these following links accumulate as I catch up on family life in a languid European summer, so here they are, belatedly, more for my own reference than anything else:

• Maptales is a gorgeous-looking social mapping site. This field is getting crowded, but the attention to detail, the clear graphical style and the special way in which you build new content — much like georeferenced blog posts — is especially compelling. Import GPX files, publish as KML, embed on any website, and there is a dynamic drag-and-drop path editing editing tool that is bested only by Google’s own MyMaps. A mobile version is promised for later this month, though it doesn’t look like you will be able to do live updating.
• This land is my land…: Some Cambodians were furious that the ASEAN website rounded the country’s surface area to the nearest 1,000 square kilometers — lobbing a whole 35 sq. km from the 181,035 sq. km. official tally. As a diplomatic incident brewed, ASEAN’s webmaster quickly relented. Luckily, these people haven’t noticed Google Earth’s approximated Cambodian borders. Yet.
• iPhone does GeoRSS, KML: More confirmation: Both KML and GeoRSS links are opened in iPhone’s Google Maps app. Not sure how much complicated KML you can throw at it, but placemarks certainly seem to work. See the visual proof.
• Good design & KML: Richard Treves has a new blog: Google Earth Design (“The Antidote to Red Dot Fever – Good Design for your Google Earth Map.”) Making a website is easy — making a nicely designed website is hard. It’s no different with KML files, and Richard is well-positioned to help, with a longstanding interest in making Google Earth maps deliver information more efficiently.
• DIY spying: A nice sequence of Digital Globe imagery of a Chinese submarine base taken over a couple of years noting various stages of development. Makes you wish for time layers in Google Earth. I’d gladly pay for it:-)
• German GE help: GE-hilfe.de is a German-language Google Earth tutorial and news site.
• Taxing India: In India, the Lucknow Municipal Corporation is going to start using Google Earth to make tax assessment of properties, reports Lucknow Newsline. Why? “We were finding many difficulties in the manual assessment. The LMC did not have sufficient staff. Plus house owners are not always supportive.”
• More KML by pros: Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise 2008 gets the ability to publish KML, reports All Points Blog. (press release)
• iTag: Free Geography Tools reviews iTag, a free photo tagging tool for Windows that includes some geotagging options.
• Conversion tool: ITNConv for Windows converts between a long list of popular mapping file formats, including KML.
• Google Earth saves, cont.: Alabama Homeland Security uses Google Earth Enterprise in a manner that Google truly approves of, reports Birmingham Business Journal. (Via All Points Blog)

Nokia N95 Corner:

• Assisted GPS explained: Ed Parsons delves into the Nokia N95’s “assisted GPS” solution that came with the latest firmware update. You may need to tweak the settings before it works for you. (Here’s how A-GPS works. And here are Nokia’s own instructions for improving the odds of getting a fix.)
• Maploader updated: Mapperz notes a update to Nokia’s Maploader software. Maploader lets you download hundreds of megabytes of road and POI data for use by the Nokia Maps application on my phone, so it doesn’t have to go via a data network. Of course, you’ll never use most of it, it takes up lots of room, and it only gets updated twice a year (and only then if you do so manually), but this is great if you’re going to be travelling through hostile data networks:-). (Via Downloadsquad)