ReadWriteWeb

If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program.

The NWS has always solicited severe weather reports from the public. After all, no amount of technology can ever be a substitute for an accurate report of what's actually happening on the ground. Because of the new Twitter geolocation API and the increasing number of applications that support it (TweetDeck for iPhone is the latest to add geotagging support), it's become very simple for the public to submit severe weather reports and for the NWS to pinpoint where they happened.

With the rapid growth of services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, location-based mobile social networks seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but they're only fun and useful if your friends are using it, too.

Each time that I've tried one of these services, I find myself trying to convince my friends to use it so that I can have meaningful contacts to keep track of. Some of them don't have the right phone, or are worried about blasting out their GPS coordinates to the world.

You'd think it was odd if you called me for directions and I told you to go 0.2 miles southeast and make a slight right onto Old Route 17.

You'd expect me to say something more like, "Start driving away from the library and take the second right just after the McDonald's." Google Maps India has just launched a hybridized version of directions that give geographically accurate distances and directions as well as landmarks most humans would also recognize. We can imagine this coming to the rural U.S. and Google telling us to "follow that-there little jog in the road where the big oak tree used to be before Jimmy Ray hit it with his daddy's combine, bless his heart, for 2.3 miles."

Google is announcing a new contest for local would-be heroes.

The Map Maker Global Competition, which challenges users to add high-quality data on universities, schools, hospitals and medical clinics in Google Map Maker, will run from Dec. 15, 2009 to Jan. 31, 2010. The grand prize for the user who adds the greatest quantity of data is a $50,000 UNICEF donation to the winner's home country.

For once the Bay Area Rapid Transit service has more to brag about than its endless supply of used under-the-seat bubble gum and noxious mystery smells. According to its site, Bay Area Rapid Transit will be the first transit agency to partner with location-based game sensation Foursquare.

Similar to the real-time stream itself, ReadWriteWeb's Real-Time Web Summit dares to tackle a collective stream of consciousness. As the official live bloggers, the ReadWriteWeb team is aggregating some of today's highlights. One of the great things about this event is that many of the disparate voices in the stream are meeting face to face (or in the flesh) for the first time. Naturally, this morning's event sessions included a discussion about location-based real-time data.