Google announced today that mapping markup language KML has been accepted by and will be given to the Open Geospatial Consortium, an international mapping standards body. KML will now be known as OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML), opening up what should be an explosive new era in online mapping.
The announcement wasn't a surprise. KML was already in use for map overlays by Microsoft Live and Yahoo! Maps. None the less, this could end up being an important event in the unfolding history of the web. Here's some of the big takeaways we see in the announcement today.
Recently, a new Wikipedia mashup came on the scene - WikiFM, this one a mashup of Wikipedia and popular music streaming service Last.fm. The mashup lets you listen to Last.fm via a player loaded in a frame on the right while the Wikipedia page for the artist or band is loaded in the frame on the left. The idea itself is great, but the execution of the mashup leaves a lot to be desired.
Nick O'Neil has the scoop on a new Facebook feature that asks members to suggest friends for new users. The feature is a refinement of the "people you may know" feature that Facebook quietly launched in March. Because new users don't have many connections, the "people you may know" feature has no friends to draw upon (since it works by seeing who you are connected to by degrees through current friends). This new feature relies on human suggestions from the few friends new users do have to fill in the gaps for new users.
Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the "era of blogger's control" is over. What all these discussions hinged on was whether or not a web service called Shyftr had the right to appropriate bloggers' RSS feeds and build their brand around our content (a practice they've now modified due to this outcry).
SocialVibe is an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity. Users compete for status and prizes by shilling for their favorite brands, while a cut of the proceeds goes to a charity of their choice. The more popular you are on social networks or elsewhere on the web (for example, if you author a popular blog) the more money you can raise for charity and the more chances you can earn to win prizes.
Widget provider JS-Kit has released their latest widget this morning, Score. Score adds a thumbs up/thumbs down-style ratings widget to any page content, and then aggregates the data across the entire web site into an info box that can highlight a site's top content. It can also integrate with JS-Kit's Navigator offering, which pulls ratings data from other JS-Kit widgets into a central location. In effect, that turns any site into a walled Digg-like ratings community, where users can vote up top content that can then be highlighted by site owners.
Just launched today is a new Twitter mashup called Twitlinks. This one aggregates the latest links posted to Twitter by tech industry pundits. The end result is a homepage that kind of resembles Techmeme, only without the threading of topics. It may even be the only news aggregator that is faster than Techmeme in delivering news, although I haven't tested that! (Techmeme is very fast and usually the first place that I discover tech news)
April is usually a busy month on the Web conference schedule, with my personal highlight being the Web 2.0 Expo. Since 2005 I've never missed a TechWeb / O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference; and this one will be no exception. In fact there will be a number of ReadWriteWeb authors roaming around, with Marshall Kirkpatrick, Josh Catone, Sean Ammirati, Emre Sokullu, and Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines also in attendance.
Our network blog AltSearchEngines is holding an invitation only gathering of search engines on Monday 21 April, in San Francisco. This private event, called simply the AltSearchEngines Get Together is being held the day before the Web 2.0 Expo. The event is targeted at the hundreds of alternative search engines that Charles Knight covers, so that they can meet and mix. More details below. If you're a search startup and/or a reporter interested in this niche, please contact Charles Knight to request an invite.
Seventeen years ago, on April 10th 1991, a plane landed in John F. Kennedy airport. That plane
had just crossed the Atlantic carrying, amongst others, passengers escaping the crumbling Soviet empire.
One of whom was me. I walked off that plane with a first ever taste of Coca-Cola in my mouth, a lame teenage mustache,
and not a clue about what to expect.
