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Market-leading Geographic Information System company Esri today released the first stable new version of its ArcGIS Editor for Open Street Map since the eyebrow-raising (if still a little green) tool made a splash at launch last July.

Map 2.0 geeks generally consider OpenStreetMap (OSM) one of the coolest things in the geo-world and all things Esri among the least cool. If people working at day jobs in government and industry start making substantial additions to OSM using their existing enterprise-scale tools, though, it could be a winning situation for everyone. The update to version 1.1 brings ArcGIS Editor for OSM out of beta with several bug fixes and improved memory resource utilization.

Global collaborative mapping platform OpenStreetMap launched a beautiful new map editing interface today. Called Potlatch 2, the tool is the fruit of several years of development and is a big improvement in speed, responsiveness and flexibility.

OpenStreetMap is a great way to learn about the nooks and the crannies, the hills, valleys, parks, paths, monuments, parks, businesses, neighborhoods and more in your own home town or exotic places far away. It's like the Wikipedia of world in local maps, but to date, it's been a little challenging to fill up with rich edits. The improved WYSIWYG interface, vector background layers and improved undo function of Potlach 2 should make the service even more enjoyable to edit. The barrier to getting started is now even lower.

Ah, the frustrations of trying to access a map on your phone when you've got limited Internet connection. Well now you needn't worry with ForeverMap.

Google gets a lot of kudos (and, okay, triggers a fair amount of concern) about its mapping efforts with Google Maps and Google Street View. But even with innovations to the vehicles that Google is using to capture the data - tricycles, for example, not cars - it's just not feasible to map everything.

There are alternatives to Google Maps, of course, and one of my favorites is OpenStreetMap, a collaborative map-making effort that allows people to correct and add information to maps. With a wiki-like process, OpenStreetMap, users can create and edit a map as a "living document," often including much better local information.

One of the superior apps on the Android phone has long been Google Maps, with its turn-by-turn and voice-guided navigation missing from the iPhone version. So on the surface, MapQuest has a difficult sell to Android users with the launch of its free app today.

The MapQuest app also offers the turn-by-turn capabilities and takes advantage of Android's speech capabilities to offer a voice guide as well. The benefits of MapQuest over Google Maps comes from the former's use of OpenStreetMap (OSM), making the mapping app usable outside the U.S. and adding to it some user-submitted data.

AOL-owned MapQuest has undergone a number of changes over the last year, including a major overhaul. Today, it has launched a new initiative that may help endear the once top dog in online mapping to much of the geolocation community - a U.S. site based on crowdsourced mapping effort OpenStreetMaps.

MapQuest has already introduced similiar sites across Europe and Asia, but this site - open.mapquest.com - brings OSM data to the U.S.

OpenStreetMap is a global map edited by volunteers, like the Wikipedia of the mapping world. Founded in 2004, the project is a fascinating collection of local knowledge and is a lot of fun to participate in. Last month OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast announced that he was leaving for-profit Cloud Made, the primary company behind OSM. Today he announced where he's going next: to be a Principal Architect at Bing Maps. Reaction in the mapping community has been mixed but this is a move that will be talked about for a long time. With the rise of location-aware mobile devices and platforms for processing massive amounts of data, including location data, geo technology is poised to grow far more important than it already is today.

Coast is a giant figure in the mapping world. In 2009, readers of leading geo publication Directions Magazine voted him the 2nd most influential person in the geospatial world, ahead of the Google Maps leadership and behind only Jack Dangermond, the dynamic founder of 41-year old $2 billion GIS company ESRI. Coast will turn 30 years old next month.

Fans of geographic information systems (GIS) can now get their mapping fix on the go, as the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) has launched an impressive mapping application for iOS devices. The California-based company specializes in providing GIS and geodatabase software applications, and holds a significant share of these markets. With the free ArcGIS app, users can now access and explore an enormous database of maps, including street maps, topographic maps, ecological maps and more.

German navigation company Skobbler is bringing their turn-by-turn, OSM iPhone streetmap application to the United States. Skobbler describes itself as "an Internet community with a free mobile phone navigation system."

Skobbler has been testing the application in several states in the last few weeks and has reportedly found the OpenStreetMap data quite good. OSM is a collaborative, crowdsourced project to map the world from the ground up, using volunteers and an emphasis on open-source presentation and rendering.

Flickr just announced support for OpenStreetMap, the wiki-like mapping service that allows users to create and edit maps. Starting today, photos that are tagged with an OpenStreetMap node ID will include a link to OpenStreetMap (OSM) right underneath the photo. OSM assigns a random number to objects on its maps and Flickr can now read this number and also extract additional data about places from the OSM database. In addition, Flickr also announced that it will now support venue ID tags for the increasingly popular Foursquare service.