ReadWriteWeb

"These riots were not about poverty," England's Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday. But thanks to publicly available data, free services like Google Maps and Web collaboration, statements like that are now more fact-checkable than ever. Or at least the discourse can get more complicated easier than before.

London's data-loving Guardian newspaper did just that this morning, mapping out the data about riot locations and the home addresses of people arrested in the riots. Those data were then put against socioeconomic information regarding particular neighborhoods. The conclusion? At least in some parts of the UK, it seems pretty clear that riot participants came from impoverished areas and acted in less poor places.

How do you get from Hot Topic to Orange Julius? With Bing Maps for Mobile, of course! Microsoft's innovative but too-unloved mobile map search service announced today that it has added floor plan maps for 400 shopping malls to m.bing.com. I'm not able to access the feature yet, but this wouldn't be the first time an announcement like this preceded go-live time.

This is honestly the kind of thing I can imagine using and I can imagine other people using it too. "I often cannot find my way out of Baby Gap," confirms ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski. Mall navigation is a serious problem genuine inconvenience that mobile technology ought to solve.

Late last week when Google Plus began opening up to more and more users, the leaders of the project said they were doing their best to include speakers of more than 40 different languages around the world. How geographically distributed were these first users? I thought I'd ask, on Google Plus itself, just where people were. Users posted their locations and a few short words of feedback on the service, from 2AM PST to 8AM PST July 1st when we hit the 500 comment limit on Plus.

Above, a map made with the help of data visualization guy friend of RWW Michael J. Rubillo. You can click on any of the places on the map and see peoples' reactions, when they posted one. It's just a snapshot, of course, but I think it does communicate two things: Plus is being tested all around the world and most people were feeling very positive about it, at least at the end of last week.

Above, Irish designer John McDermott displays GPS data exported from the bicycling community MapMyRide in a very different way. The change of perspective confers a new feeling to the data. This wasn't just a long bike ride, this was an epic trek that deserves to be commemorated.

McDermott, who heads design at Irish interactive agency AB Brown, has removed all other map data to focus on the route itself and puts the starting and ending point in the distant background to help communicate the great distance traveled. In the bottom corner are details like the date, duration, distance, speed and a graphic representation of the weather during the ride. It's a great example of how a strong design can evoke new communicative value from the data we produce though our everyday activities.

A new version of Google Earth for Android was released today to be able to take advantage of the larger form factor of and robust computing power of Honeycomb tablets.

The update for Honeycomb adds support for fully textured 3D buildings and an action bar on top of the app for easier search. It will also allow users to "fly to your location" and adds Google Maps layer-like functionality to integrate Google Places, Panoramio photos and Wikipedia notations.

The WikiLeaks saga of the last two weeks has been illustrative, if nothing else, of the importance of the decentralization of the Internet in relation to the freedom of information. An attempt to stifle a voice in one location simply leads to that voice springing from another, like a leak from a rusted pipe or a Whac-A-Mole arcade game. 

WikiLeaks currently has well over 1,000 mirrors, which host the same data in different locations in case the parent site is taken down, and one Harvard developer has gathered all of these mirrors into a Google Earth visualization to show from whence these leaks have sprung. 

MapQuest, owned by AOL, has taken backseat to newer mapping services like Google Maps and Bing Maps of late. But the venerable driving directions site added some exciting new data to its open API: bike routing information. Users and developers will now be able to access routes optimized for biking through MapQuest's Open Directions Service.

It was National Banned Books Week here in the United States earlier this month and the organizations behind it put together a Google Map of bans and challenges to books around the country over the last three years. It's worth a good look.

Banned Books Week has been running for 28 years now and is backed by some very reputable organizations, but the campaign's Web presence is very simple. It's great that Google Maps makes it so easy for anyone to display sets of information on a map like you'll see below. As more and more content becomes available online, how will that impact banning of and access to literature?

Featuring entrepreneurial communities outside Silicon Valley is a topic close to our hearts, particularly if they're outside the U.S. Our "Never Mind The Valley" series challenges perceptions about locations for startups, and "entrepreneurial density" is an intriguing topic for VCs and entrepreneurs alike.

Think you live in a startup hotspot? If you're reading this, you probably do - but you may not be visualizing just how hot (or not) your location is. For some entrepreneurs location is everything, while others might be intrigued to discover areas of activity in countries or cities they didn't expect.

You probably hear about Foursquare all the time, we certainly write about it a lot here on ReadWriteWeb, but did you know that there are many other things going on in the world of location and mapping? It's a red-hot sector, producing innovative new technologies and use-cases every day.

Where can you learn about all this geo-creativity? Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've come up with a system for efficiently discovering a large number of the top blogs on any subject - and we track the top stories in Geolocation closely. We've decided to open up a little bit of our research and share with you our list of the Top Blogs in Geolocation This Week. Read on to find out which top 10 blogs are writing the hottest stuff now and see all 300 of the blogs we're tracking.