Gary’s Bloggage has a fascinating post on a researcher whom created a botnet to map the Internet – specifically, the locations of devices connected to the Internet It was a cheeky mauouver, but resulted in a map nearly as interesting as its creation.
The All Points Blog alerts us to a Wall Street Journal article that tells of Apple’s recent US$20 million acquisition of indoor location company, WifiSLAM. I tend to agree with Joe: this year will certainly be the year of indoor location.
A more thorough analysis of the acquisition is available over at Prioleau Advisors, whom speculates that the first application of the technology by Apple won’t be for Maps.
GIS Lounge has a brief piece on an Italian design company that is showing innovation in the area of paper maps and globes – an area often considered stagnant and archaic when compared to digital mapping systems. They have some interesting and compelling products, too.
All Things Spatial has a post following up from a previous “GIS Standards Dilemma” post, focussing on GIS metadata standard deficiencies, and how they’ve affected Australia’s attempt at creating an SDI.
Speaking of the SDI, Galdos Systems has a post that argues that the technical side of Spatial Data Infrastructures must be seen as a kind of Universal Service Bus, with the objective of enabling rapid interconnection of data and services to create new multi-party applications spanning multiple jurisdictions and large geographic areas. It goes so far as to say that any other interpretation of Spatial Data Infrastructure technology can be forgotten.
History buffs will appreciate a collection of web maps from Google Maps Mania that display various aspects of the Roman Empire, including: locations of buildings and artefacts; a crowd-sourced information map; a directions map that uses ancient routes for route planning; and ancient Roman map tiles that can be used with the Google Maps API.
Google Maps Mania also has a map that shows the locations of recent Instagram photos, but – perhaps more interestingly – another map that allows you to walk down a street (using Street View) and view images posted from Instagram, Yelp, and Twitter. Neat.
