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ESRI and the US Department of the Interior announced a new website today that makes it easy for anyone to view 30 years of global satellite data and changes in vegetation world-wide. Called the ChangeMatters Viewer, the project democratizes access to the multi-billion dollar, multi-decade, multi-agency project of monitoring global ecological well-being from space.

ESRI, a giant geodata company that works closely with government, is the clear leader of the Geo 1.0 technology world. It believes the 30-meter resolution imagery will be helpful for mapping regional trends in climate change, agriculture, wildlife habitat, forestry, regional planning, coastal zones and national security. It certainly makes me want to ask the people behind planning at the Portland airport (pictured above) why there's been so much vegetation lost along the river north of my house over the last 30 years.

The Q&A site Quora has rolled out a new feature: the ability to upload a photo to accompany your posts.

Developer Ben Newman added a post this afternoon titled "Something new that you can do," featuring a large photograph. His post, first spotted by The Next Web, was received with a flurry of excitement, although Newman says it's a "work in progress."

According to an announcement on the Official Google Blog, the search engine giant is rolling out a new format for their universal image results. Set to go live over the next 24 hours, the updated format will now feature one larger image alongside multiple smaller images. Because of this new layout, you'll be able to see "more pictures than before," writes Google Software Engineer Alex Petcherski in the blog post.

Google just rolled out 18 social gadgets for its iGoogle start page. These social gadgets turn iGoogle into a far more interactive and social experience, as users can now play casual games with other iGoogle users and share videos and to-do lists right from the iGoogle homepage. As Google's Marissa Mayer and Rose Yao, iGoogle's product manager, told us yesterday, while the first incarnation of iGoogle was about connecting people with information, the service will now also focus on connecting people to each other.

Los Angeles, California based PicBrk dropped us a note today to let us know that it just launched its new Website devoted to breaking news pictures and real-time image searches. The company had planned to launch on July 1st but given the recent events in Tehran, it has decided to launch early. In a recent RWW post, Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, "real-time information delivery is fast emerging as one of the most important elements of our online experience" and it seems as though companies are competing to get their real-time services online as soon as possible.

Aviary, a sophisticated online collaborative image editing tool suite, today released a much awaited API. The interface will allow any 3rd party website to add image editing tools right into its existing offerings. This technology could quietly change the way many people experience images around the web.

Aviary's products are stunning and we expect that many people will be very surprised to find new image editing tools now available on their favorite websites.

A grainy video has just become available from the Adobe Max conference in Milan, Italy last month of a sneak peek at a new experiment called Infinite Images.

The project is so cool we couldn't help but post about it, even though very little about it is known yet.