In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

I'm back in front of the keyboard after a 3 weeks break with my wife and daughters. I'll catchup and share the recent geonews in the coming days. Thank you for your patience. Let's start with Google geonews (because they're easier to aggregate).

From the official sources:

• There's new 45° imagery in 24 citites: Augusta, GA; Badajoz, Spain; Boise, ID; Boston, MA; Fairfield, CA; Girona, Spain; Knoxville, TN; Lausanne, Switzerland; Little Rock, AR; Lodi, CA; Merida, Spain; Modesto, CA; Montgomery, AL; Murrieta Hot Springs, CA; Provo, UT; Reno, NV; Salem, OR; Sebastopol, CA; Spokane, WA; Tallahassee, FL; Vacaville , CA; Vallejo, CA; Victorville, CA; Wichita, KS; Yucaipa, CA
• Weather forecasts is a new layer in Google Maps, along with cloud coverage, data from third-party sources
• Google Maps gets voice recognition and you can now say your map queries out loud, if you use Google Chrome
• The new GTFS-realtime, extending the original 'General Transit Feed Specification', has been released to the public by Google, it includes: Trip Updates, Service Alerts and Vehicle Position updates
• Here's the announcement of the deprecation of the Maps API for Flash
• StreetView news;
  • New in StreetView is a 30-mile section of the Rio Negro River tributary in the Amazonian bassin, also discussed over Slashdot
  • Slashdot reports that StreetView has finally been approved by the Israeli government
  • Irak's National Museum corridors can be walked in StreetView
• Using short URLs to share links is now a permanent feature of Google Maps
• Google added a round of 3D trees Los Angeles, Denver and Boulder
• Ancient and modern Rome have updated 3D content (remember 2008?)
• Google announced Map Makerpedia, a crowdsourced guide for Google Map Maker (you mean similar goals to wiki.openstreetmap.org? ;-)
• The Static Maps API's new feature is the ability to scale the display of maps
• There was an imagey update to Google Earth and Maps for the week of the 15th, and another one on the week of August 29th, with several tens of countries getting new imagery
• Google Maps is now available in 40+ new country domain names, and more languages have been added to "Your World in 3D"
• Paronamio users and contributors can now join groups of interests
• Google mentioned a new book named The Great Global Treasure Hunt on Google Earth, and informed us that they are now at over 700 million activations of Google Earth, which made me though of our current poll

From other sources:

• In a series of generic but useful entries, the GE Blog is offering an entry named Ten easy steps to learn about a place with Google Earth, another one named Measuring distances with the Google Earth Ruler and yet another one named Running Google Earth offline from a portable server
• Ogle Earth analized Sweden imagery update and reminds us of being cautious of imagery tagged January 1st
• Google and OpenDNS are working on global Internet sppedup, and unsurprisingly, they use location data