The Sydney Morning Herald has created a really interesting interactive map that shows ‘Sydney’s melting pot of languages’ – and provides information on the languages, and several different views to see the distribution of the many, many different languages spoken in this city of migrants.

The ABC has run a piece highlighting a recent call by an Australian parliamentary committee on the need for stronger privacy laws regarding the use of UAVs.

BigThink’s Strange Maps blog has a post that uses a comparison of two cartograms to display the population changes that have occurred over the last decade. As usual, it’s backed by a thorough, interesting, and thought-provoking analysis.

The KnowWhere consulting blog has a really good post on open source software, in particular, calling for the broader recognition that it isn’t ‘free’, but rather provides an excellent business model for supporters, and is calling upon users to also support the open movement, and lists good practice for organisations that use OS GIS. Well worth a read.

Google Maps Mania highlights the ominously entitled ‘Project Doom’, which highlights natural, man-made and transport disasters that have occurred in Australia since 1967. The comment is that we’d all be safer if we moved to the west coast, but of course the map doesn’t normalise for population density wah wah misrepresentation of spatial data wah wah…

GIS Lounge has the news that the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research (IJGER) has been published with the theme of ‘Geospatial Analysis of Urban Environment’.

The Esri User Conference is running this week in San Diego, CA, and GeoDecisions has posted a ‘top 10’ list of what to expect at the event.

The GIS User blog is also blogging from ‘on the ground’ at the Esri UC, so Esri heads should be sure to follow along.