In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Get mobile access to masterpiece paintings of your location as you travel.  Historypin supports mobile (and desktop) access to vintage photos of pinpointed locations, and now landscape (and cityscape) paintings, so far of Italy and France.

Editor's addition: last time we mentioned the GeocodedArt project was in 2010.

Google is clearly one of the most news-generating entity in the geospatial industry. Here's the recent Google-related geonews.

From official sources:

• Google now uses live traffic data alongside with historical data  for trip durations in Google Maps, they use the My Location feature on Google Maps for Android to extrapolate live traffic conditions. This news was also discussed over Slashdot
• And if that isn't enough, we now get typical traffic for roads, not just highways
• Here are the finalists for the Google Model Your Town Competition 2012
• Google Maps for Android got a fresh look with version 6.5
• Google released the Google Maps Floor Plan Marker app, to help orient customer in businesses 
• Mix art and Street View and you get the Google Art Project
• You can now see service alerts for the London Underground in Maps
• Traffic and Transit Come to Google Maps in Malaysia
• And there's new 45° imagery available for 15 cities: US: Atlanta, GA; Canyon Lake, TX; Charleston, SC; Dallas, TX; Houston, TX; Lakeland, FL; Lubbock, TX; Orlando, FL; Port Charlotte, FL; Roanoke, TX; San Luis Obispo, CA; Smyrna, TN; Walker, LA. International: Adelaide, Australia; Cordoba, Argentina
• The Weather Layer is now available in the Google Maps API

From other sources:

• The GEB found out about the latest imagery update in Google Earth yesterday
• The GEB also shares an entry named Exposing Shantytowns in India with Google Earth

Wemo Media Unveils Global Art Entertainment Experience: theBlu.com

Academy Award Winners, Top-Tier Universities and Digital Creators From All Around the Globe Join Wemo Media's mission to Create the World’s Largest Art and Entertainment Project

LOS ANGELES, CA - October 18, 2011 – Wemo Media (http://www.wemomedia.com), collaborating with digital industry leaders, including Avatar Academy Award winning animation director Andy Jones and MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, announced today the launch of their “Maker Media” platform, which enables artists and developers around the world to peer-produce globally shared media.

Wemo Media's first project, theBlu (http://theblu.com), bringing the Ocean to life on the web, is a global mission to create art and entertainment on a scale that was not possible before the Internet. Using the Maker Media Platform, theBlu engages people from around the world to create and experience shared art in real time online.

“I’ve always thought it would be cool to create a simulation of the ocean with all the vast variety of species, but every time I would consider it, I’d realize that it was just too ambitious,” said Oscar-winning Visual Effects Supervisor and lead member of theBlu, Kevin Mack. “But theBlu makes this possible because you have thousands of artists from all over the world collaborating.”

theBlu promises to marry the Web’s billions of points of interaction with the Ocean’s millions of diverse elements in a nexus where the Web is, itself, a new medium for artistic expression. Imagine hundreds of thousands of aquatic species in tens of thousands of underwater habitats – all beautiful works of art created by artists and developers all over the world, swimming across the Web via phones, tablets and computers from Los Angeles to London, Madrid to Mumbai and Sao Paulo to Seoul.

Wemo Media Leadership Team member and Academy Award Winner Louie Psihoyos, Director of The Cove states, “One of the biggest problems that the oceans face is that people don't see what's going on in the Ocean. This project is a way for people to put their heads under the water without getting wet, a terrific way for people to not only see the Ocean but actually create it.”

theBlu is the first of many such Maker Media titles that Wemo Media will be releasing through its groundbreaking Maker Media Platform. This disruptive media creation platform welcomes all types of creatives – artists, software engineers, animators, composers – to collaborate from all over the world. Currently in private beta, the Maker Media Platform has already been embraced by top-tier universities around the world, including MIT, USC and CMU, whose students are some of the first “Makers” on the innovative platform.

Director of the MIT Media Lab, Joichi Ito, and advisor to Wemo Media said, “My life, and now even more so with the MIT Media Lab, has been about pulling together things that aren’t normally together. The really interesting thing about theBlu is how it brings together the biology, the activism of conservation, the beauty and the artistic elements as well as the grassroots, participatory maker media movement. I'm very excited about the possibilities ahead.”

Makers in theBlu select the species and habitats they want to create, and submit their art on the Maker Platform for curation. Makers showcase their art to a global audience while they connect with a community of peers, receive direct feedback from world-class digital makers, like Kevin Mack and Andy Jones, and get paid for their contributions based on the popularity of their creations.

“We’re just getting started. TheBlu is in private beta and we invite you to join early and become a seminal part of this global collaborative art and entertainment movement,” said Founder and CEO Neville Spiteri. “We are passionate about the enabling power of the social web, we are moved by creations that strike global chords, like Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album and Google Earth, and we are inspired by the great storytellers of our time, like James Cameron and John Lasseter. theBlu represents a new art form where the canvas is the web and the topic and the inspiration is nature, the Ocean; an amazing combination of ‘code + data = art’, with everybody contributing from all over the world, together, on the web.”

I recently had to work with some geological maps. Although I'm not a geologist, I enjoyed their visual appeal -- who knew science could be this pretty? Here are a few samples of particularly handsome maps, along with a simple explanation of what they represent.

[Editor's note: this anonymous submission reminded me that beautiful maps are more efficient at conveying information. We did mention art a few times in the past, including GeocodedArt.com]

Here's the weekly batch of geonews, finally on a regular Friday.

On the ESRI front:

• Recently, ESRI open sourced the ESRI Geoportal Server. Some twitter users were quick to mention that you still need ArcGIS Server software to use the Geoportal Server. [UPDATE: see comments below, it seems such a license is not a requirement after all.] To me, that's still a nice step. Their definition of a geoportal: "A geoportal is a gateway to Web-based geospatial resources, enabling users to discover, view and access geospatial information and services made available by their providing organizations. Likewise, data providers can use the geoportal to make their geospatial resources discoverable, viewable, and accessible to others."
• The popular blog SpatiallyAdjusted shares some elements that could be improved about the ArcGIS 10 user interface

On the open source front:

• O'Reilly discusses a new open source software called WEAVE (Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment), which obviously include a mapping component
• If you're into FDO, you'll be happy to learn of the new SequentialProcess for batch mode processing
• QGIS gets new label tools
• Remember Polymaps? The open source mapping framework Polymaps is now integrated into GeoCommons

In the miscellaneous category:

• REST and RESTful was widely discussed in the past few years in the geospatial community, including within ESRI, the open source and OGC rings. Thanks to this entry named Richardson Maturity Model: steps toward the glory of REST, I think I finally correctly understand what REST is about! ;-) (sorry I don't remember how I ended up on that article)
• TMR informs us MapQuest launched My Maps last June, with the same name of the similar feature provided on Google Maps, basically allowing you to save and share user-created maps
• SS shares a long perspective entry named What forces are at play in the evolution of geospatial industry sectors?
• NAVTEQ acquires the 3D modeling company named PixelActive
• APB informs us Yahoo has launched a new service called Local Offers: "that it said will give users information about local merchants along with coupons and information on deals at stores in their neighborhoods."
• Kurt shares interesting thoughts on GIS, followed by What is GIS? A workflow definition

In the maps category:

• Here's the evolution of active Facebook users by region
• A nice entry on The Human Development Index in Africa and Across the World
• SS shares an entry named Mapping Opportunity in America
• While I was aware of it, we mentioned mentioned it yet. The GEB discusses the USGS "Earth as Art" beautiful collection of Landsat imagery