The pycsw team proudly announces the release of pycsw 1.8.0 codenamed "data". This release powers the data CSW endpoints. data is the home of the U.S. Government's open data.

The 1.8.0 release brings significant features, enhancements and fixes to the codebase, including:

•  support for PostgreSQL Full Text Search
•  support for repository filtering
•  support for PostgreSQL schemas other than 'public'
•  implement database connection pooling for WSGI
•  more robust native model
•  fix csw:AnyText population to be finer grained for OGC data services
•  fix UTF-8 handling in configuration

The full list of enhancements and bug fixes is available here. pycsw is an OGC CSW server implementation written in Python. pycsw fully implements the OpenGIS Catalogue Service Implementation Specification (Catalogue Service for the Web). Initial development started in (more formally announced). The project is certified OGC Compliant, and is an OGC Reference Implementation. pycsw allows for the publishing and discovery of geospatial metadata. Existing repositories of geospatial metadata can also be exposed via OGC:CSW 2.0.2, providing a standards-based metadata and catalogue component of spatial data infrastructures. pycsw is Open Source, released under an MIT license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X). The source code is available here. Testers and developers are welcome. The pycsw developer team.

Independent software developers, scientists, industry experts, and agency representatives will come to meet at the FOSS4-Europe conference held in Bremen, Germany from July 15 to 17. Contributions can now be submitted on the conference website until April 15.

Under this year’s motto “Independent Innovation for INSPIRE, Big Data and citizen participation” the conference series FOSS4G-Europe (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial - Europe) is uniting the GIS community from a broad spectrum of fields like geodesy, geo information, land management, and remote sensing. Industry and public authorities are expressly invited as they increasingly realize value and economic potential of free and open source products.

Several additional events make the FOSS4G-Europe in Bremen a unique event. A public viewing of the soccer World Championship final will kick off a week packed with events. The week will open with a workshop “Big Geo Data & INSPIRE” especially targeted at public authorities. INSPIRE Annex II and III will be discussed in relation to the pertaining standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium. Canadian Jeff McKenna, President of the OSGEO Foundation, will open the event with his keynote talk. As a charter member McKenna has got involved with spreading and usage of open-source software for geo information systems for many years. In a plenary, the winners of the international academic NASA World Wind Challenge Europe programming contest will be announced and honored at the conference.

Being in the tradition of the worldwide FOSS4G conference series, this event will bring together open-source experts and enthusiasts from all over Europe and beyond creating a unique, visionary atmosphere.

Conference Dates:

General presentations and workshops:

• Abstract submission: apr-15
• Review notification: apr-30
• Conference: jul-13

Scientific Track:

• Abstract submission: apr-15
• Full paper submission: apr-22
• Review notification: may-15
• Camera ready version: jun-15
• Conference: jul-13

Early bird registration deadline: may-22

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode. I've been struggling with many fires, I currently publish much less frequently than usual, but don't worry, everything major is in there!

From the open source / open data front:

• Dubbed as the Shapefile replacement, we discussed the GeoPackage standard several times, next week March 5 there's a webinar about it
• Certainly useful, GitHub adds visual history for maps, visualizing geojson updates directly on a map
• In case you missed the press release, open source 3D city platform ViziCities released on GitHub
• The power of open data, At Sochi Olympics, Crowdsourced OpenStreetMap Trounces Google Maps
• And if you wonder, Sochi was not mapped for Olympics and look at the nice maps you can do with open data - Sochi, with love
• News of OpenLayers 3 currently in beta 2, OpenLayers 3 Is Coming, Creating a custom build of OpenLayers 3 and there's even The book of OpenLayers3 is coming
• Using MapServer on Windows? Announcing MapServer MapManager 1.0
• In other updates, what's new in QGIS 2.2 which by itself could have deserved it's own entry, GeoTools 10.5 released and Rasterio 0.6
• Interesting entry on PostGIS bugs

From the Esri front:

• An article from readwrite, Esri Enables Federal Agencies To Open GIS Mapping Data To The Public
• We mentioned it last November, Introducing Esri’s Geotrigger Service: Welcome to the Future of Geofencing
• There's CityEngine key new features
• And What’s coming in ArcGIS Online March
• APB also offer Top 10 Take-Aways from the Opening Plenary of Esri’s Federal GIS Conference

From the Google front:

• Here's a very interesting article from Frank Taylor on the future of Google Earth, which apparently is being left aside in favor of Google Maps
• Google is Introducing Google Maps Gallery: Unlocking the World’s Maps
• The Canadian north in Street View, Wandering in the footsteps of the polar bear with Google Maps
• And it goes to India too, Discover the Taj Mahal and other iconic Indian monuments on Street View
• And a frequent topic, Monitoring the World's Forests with Global Forest Watch
• And if you don't like OpenStreetMap and open data, Expanding Google's Map Maker community in Southern and Eastern Europe
• A book review, Google Maps JavaScript API Cookbook
• Pretty nice and useful, Visualizing Google Search Results overlaid over 3D buildings

Discussed over Slashdot:

• DIY, Radar Expert Explains How To Cheaply Add Radar To Your Own Hardware Projects
• Video, not just photo anymore, New 360-Degree Video Capture Method Unveiled
• After autonomous cars, Terrafugia Wants Their Flying Car To Be Autonomous
• Don't tell me you're surprised, Lumia Phones Leaking Private Data To Microsoft
• That's not fun for their users,  Major Vulnerability In Tinder Dating App Allowed User [ Location ] Tracking
• Cellphone tracking, Death By Metadata: The NSA's Secret Role In the US Drone Strike Program
• And some of the time there's hope, ICE License-Plate Tracking Plan Withdrawn Amid Outcry About Privacy
• And there's the good uses, A New Use For Drones: Traffic Scouting
• Not surprising, Australian Police Deploy 3D Crime Scene Scanner
• A New Interactive Map For Understanding Global Flood Risks and here's a related article
• It's not going well for our oceans, 3D Maps Reveal a Lead-Laced Ocean
• It's actually from DigitalGlobe, Google Earth's New Satellites
• Car navigation, Dead Reckoning For Your Car Eliminates GPS Dead Zones
• And cars will chat together, Government To Require Vehicle-to-vehicle Communication

In the everything-else category:

• Interested in Lidar? Read LIDAR Format Wars: Towards an Open Future and it matters, Report predicts that low cost LiDAR will be disruptive in next 5 years, also related, LiDAR Data Quality Standards, Certification Discussed at LiDAR Forum Session
• Here's a list of Free GIS Apps on the Google Play Store
• Earlier this month, the 'father of GIS, Roger Tomlinson, passed away
• It has been a while since we discussed The State of CAD and GIS Integration
• A new article on What Skills Does A GIS Analyst Require
• An anniversary this month, Celebrating 25 Years of Not Getting Lost Thanks to GPS
• Groups on Earth Observations? What is GEO
• Microsoft, 15 New 3D Cities Available in the Bing Maps Preview App
• Law, California Appeals Court Rules State Law Doesn't Prohibit Driver Use of Smartphone Maps
• VIa OR, Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters
• Via OR, after iBeacons and many others, here's the Nokia Treasure Tag
• OGC news, OGC Activities and Mobile Industry Trends and the Candidate OGC IndoorGML standard available for public comment
• Amazing what you can do for fantasy locations, If Middle-Earth Were Real, These Exquisite Shots Would Be Its Vacation Brochure
• Here's a fake mapped town that became real, Agloe, the Paper Town Stronger than Fiction
• New online courses, New Geo MOOC: From GPS and Google Maps to Spatial Computing

In the maps category:

• Over Canadian national news website, there was a mention of the map of legal cannabis in the U.S.
• Syria over Wired, Hyperlocal Neighborhood Maps Reveal the Chaos in Aleppo
• Nice map, A Map of U.S. Intercity Bus and Train Routes
• The First online Global Freshwater Biodiversity Atlas

And thanks to Andrew Zolnai for his recent donation to Slashgeo, we wouldn't be there without the community!

Here what's probably our latest geonews in batch mode entry, have a nice holiday break!

From the open source / open data front:

• Boundless published a OpenLayers 3 & Google Maps API Compared
• Python and raster data? Introducing rasterio
• Here's an entry on the 25m European Digital Elevation Model (EU-DEM, Version 1)
• Much more efficient, OpenStreetMap's Redesign Goes Live! More Focused, More Inviting, More Map, and still on OSM data, Disability Mapping with OpenStreetMap
• In updates, GeoTools 10.3 Released and GeoServer 2.4.3 Released and MapGuide Open Source 2.5.2 and MapBox.js v1.5.0
• Beautiful, Using the 25m EU-DEM for shading OpenStreetMap layers

From the Esri front:

• A summary of What’s New in ArcGIS Online (December)
• Still breathing, ArcGIS 3.6 for Flex Released

From the Google front:

• Having kids? Join Santa and his elves in the countdown to Christmas Eve
• An entry telling you how to Create your own Street View
• The Bing Maps architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas is joining Google
• Google is improving maps in Building Better Maps in Brazil, Israel, and Russia
• You might be interested by National Geographic shares rich map content with the world via Google Maps Engine
• There's the classic, New Google Earth Imagery – December 6

In the everything-else category:

• If you haven't heard of the GeoPackage draft standard yet, read this, OGC's Geopackage standard enables geospatial data sharing for mobile devices
• Things do change, Open Geospatial Consortium updates its vision, mission, policies and procedures
• A new Eye in the Sky, First Images form Skybox’s SkySat-1 Released 
• An interesting read about How Can Geography Literacy Be So Bad At The Age Of Google Earth?
• Wired shares an entry named 6 Reasons to Get Over Your Fear of Coding and Start Making Better Maps
• The rise of GeoMedecine? A 10-minutes TED talk about named Your health depends on where you live
• Apple geo-related news:

  • Geofencing to Unlock Vehicle Functions Detailed in New Apple Patent Application

  • iBeacon Technology Tapped to Unlock Location-Specific Newsstand Content on iOS Devices and ​Apple Updates Apple Store App with Support for iBeacon Systems, but Apple is far from being alone in that race,  Qualcomm Launches 'Gimbal' Bluetooth LE iBeacon Competitor

• If you're not already convinced autonomous cars going to happen;
  • Ford Self-Driving R&D Car Tells Small Animal From Paper Bag At 200 Ft.

  • Nissan Leaf Prototype Becomes First Autonomous Car On Japanese Highways

  • Volvo Plans To Have Self-Driving Cars In Swedish City of Gothenburg By

• Geo and privacy:
  • If there was doubts, NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide
  • An extreme scenario, Meet Jack, or What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data
  • But there are watchdogs? FTC Drops the Hammer On Maker of Location-Sharing Flashlight App
  • and hope, Boston Police Stop Scanning Registration Plates, For Now
  • but it's really everyone, Indiana State Police Acknowledge Use of Cell Phone Tracking Device
  • and sometimes it's good, New GPS Tracking Bullet May Render High-Speed Police Chases Obsolete
• Not that surprising, Need Directions? Might Not Want To Ask a Transit Rider
• We heard lots about drones, now it's time for SkyJack, a hacking system taking control of drones and the discussion on the topic, How To Hijack a Drone For $400 In Less Than an Hour - talking of Drones, that's impressive Drone Footage of Bangkok Protests
• In Canada? The new Canadian Geodetic Vertical Datum of (CGVD2013) recently launched
• Reality surpasses fiction once again, New MIT Camera Takes 3D Photos in the Dark
• You see, geospatial is evenin our heads! Memories Are ‘Geotagged’ With Spatial Information, Penn Researchers Say
• Underwater, First 3D topography of Great Barrier Reef derived from EO data
• A discussion about National GIS for India

In the maps category:

• Wired shares Some of the Year’s Best Images of Earth From Space, nice indeed
• Income distribution across the US, Census Bureau: Majority of Affluent Counties In Northeast US
• Here's a long review fo the Barrington Atlas iPad App
• Bitcoin? Coinmap – The Interactive Map Of Brick And Mortar Locations Accepting Bitcoins
• Wow, take a look at The “underwater waterfall” of Mauritius Island

Almost everything geospatial deals with symbols on maps or other types of displaying mechanism. Here's a new source of symbols coming from the OGC MetOcean DWG, the 'World Weather Symbols' available on GitHub.

It is described as "A complete set of WMO weather symbols in SVG with full metadata." It's not a version 1.0, but they are fully usable right away and there's "A set of pre-generated PNGs are available for download [...]". From the same source you can get the 'World Meteorological Organization - Regional Associations' (WMO-RA) in geojson, which is vector data representing the "Six regional associations are responsible for the coordination of meteorological, hydrological and related activities within their respective Regions [...]".

Other openly available geospatial-related symbols sources that I'm aware of include:

• Maki icons - open source pixel-perfect icons for web cartography
• Emergency Mapping Symbology - from NRCan's GeoConnections
• GLYPHICONS - while not specifically targeting mapping, the free section is Creative Commons licensed

Any other pertinent source?

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode, covering a too long timespan once again.

On the open source / open data front:

• That's just incredible to see this that snappy in a browser, Dynamic hill shading in the browser
• Open source software can be popular, over 2,500 participants for the Free CartoDB for Beginners Webinar
• Tyler Mitchell offers a new book, Geospatial Power Tools - Open Source GDAL / OGR Command Line Utilities
• With Google Maps API v2 going dark, Upgrading from Google v2 API? Free yourself and upgrade to OpenStreetMap
• Getting speed, Marble Virtual Globe Graduates OSGeo Incubation
• GRASS GIS 7 is still in development, but you can learn about it in News in GRASS GIS 7
• Open source software update, Boundless Releases OpenGeo Suite 4.0
• Another update, GeoTools 10.1 Released
• Impressive what you can quickly do with open source javascript libraries, Showing GPS tracks in 3D with three.js and d3.js
• MapBox, strong contributors to open source geospatial, hired, amongst many others, the creator of Leaflet and Sean Gillies, they also announced MapBox.js v1.4.0

On the Esri front:

• 30TB of fresh data, Latest DigitalGlobe imagery updates span the globe
• ArcGIS development is getting multiplatform, Introducing the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt and updates, Version 10.2 of ArcGIS Runtime SDKs for iOS and OS X are now available and Announcing the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Android v10.2 release!

On the Google front:

• New versions of Google Earth don't happen every day, Google Earth updated to version 7.1.2.2041, mostly a bugfix release
• New features in Google Maps, including virtual trips in full 3D, From where you are to where you want to go
• Another new tool for recording and sharing stories, Tour Builder: Tell your stories with Google Earth
• Related to the recent international surveillance discussions, Brazil Orders Google To Hand Over Street View Data
• An interesting story, Revisiting the UTA Flight 772 memorial in Google Earth
• As usual, New Google Earth Imagery – November 12

In the everything-else category:

• James is optimistic, Does Ideas4OGC Fix Problems with OGC Standards?, it seems it really helps
• Geoff has a nice summary named James Fee on remaining relevant as a GIS professional
• Not from Google, India gets its own Street View: Wonobo
• While Autonomous Cars Will Save Money and Lives, before more driverless cars, we'll get more driverless trucks, Autonomous Dump Trucks Are Coming To Canada's Oil Sands and why not, UK Town To Get Driverless 'Pods' Mixing With Pedestrians
• Also related, Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think
• What's great is that we're also getting closer to Finland's Algorithm-Driven Public Bus
• In Canada, one of the biggest communications provider is tracking location of all users, no opt-out possible, but it won't be that simple, Is Bell's Plan to Monitor and Profile Canadians Legal?
• In the same vein, Seattle PD Mum On Tracking By Its New Wi-Fi Mesh Network, and you can also Connect To Unsecured Bluetooth Car Systems To Monitor Traffic Flow, I did not know that even car tires have RFID tags that can be tracked
• And we mentioned before being tracked in malls, it gets even more serious with Google Starts Tracking Retail Store Visits On Android and iOS
• Nothing really new there for our regular readers, Police Use James-Bond-Style GPS Bullet, and in the US, Court Rules Probable-Cause Warrant Required For GPS Trackers
• Not the first time we see a similar initiative, Oregon Extends Push To Track, Tax Drivers Per Mile, and this one titled Police Tracking License Plates Nationwide for Massive Data Base of Citizen Car Trips
• There's the usual story on the theme of US Mini-Satellites to Track and Kill Terrorists
• Unsurprisingly, New Job Listings Point to Continued Work on Transit Options in Apple Maps, transit is currently the big absent from Apple Maps, and what might be surprising, Apple Maps Significantly More Popular Than All Other iOS Mapping Apps, Including Google
• VerySpatial shares an entry named The Geography of Twitter
• Two articles on maps and marijuana; Tabulating the Underground Economy, and the DEA’s Pathetic Attempt to Map the Marijuana Trade and Unnecessary Environmental Destruction from Marijuana Cultivation in the United States
• In case you need to know, RapidEye changes name to BlackBridge
• Remote sensing will be more popular than ever, Government and industry to combine for 1150 satellites over next decade (including telecommunications)

In the maps category:

• It has been popular recently, the Digital Attack Map, A Live Map of Ongoing DDoS Attacks
• It happened to Google Maps in, Taiwan Protests Apple Maps That Show Island As Province of China
• In the U.S.? Is there too much arsenic in the soil where you live? Metals, Minerals, Poisons and Maps
• Also for the U.S., Two Detailed Rail Maps and an attempt at Mapping Honesty and Property Crime
• Crime? Police relaunches its crime map
• Let's learn a bit more, Get to Know a Projection: Lambert Conformal Conic
• The paper edition is $400, you can get the digital version for $20, The Barrington Atlas Comes to the iPad
• A map of the Countries most vulnerable to climate change
• I'm not certain if we shared that link before or not, the excellent series of 40 maps that explain the world

While we mentioned several times the WMTS OGC standard and its brother the TMS protocol, we never mentioned TileServer-PHP, an open source Web Map Tiling Server.

From the github readme: "This server distributes maps to desktop, web, and mobile applications from a standard Apache+PHP web hosting. It is a free and open-source project implementing OGC WMTS standard for pre-rendered map tiles made with MapTiler Cluster, MapTiler, GDAL2Tiles, or available as MBTiles files. It is the easiest and cheapest way how to serve zoomable maps in a standardized way - practically from any ordinary web hosting. It is easy to install - just copy the project files to a PHP-enabled directory along with your map data containing metadata.json file. It comes with an online interface showing the list of the maps and step-by-step guides for desktop GIS software [...]"

Also important, supported protocols are:

• OpenGIS WMTS 1.0.0
• OSGeo TMS 1.0.0
• TileJSON.js
• Direct access with XYZ tile requests (to existing tiles in a directory or to .mbtiles)

Catching up the geonews for the month in my absence, this topic is an important one since it tries to provide a modern alternative to the Shapefile format, the GeoPackage standard is aiming to be "super lean, accessible to all, and implementable by non-GIS experts". The GML standard failed to being widely adopted and GeoPackage is coming to the rescue. We discussed GeoPackage before, and here's the latest and important news about it.

First, on August 6th, the OGC GeoPackage draft standard for sharing spatial data was released for public comment until September 5th. Chris Holmes shared a pretty pertinent entry named Githubbing the GeoPackage specification and he is pretty positive: "I do believe the specification is ‘pretty good’ – it has improved in almost all the ways I was hoping it would [...]. I do believe GeoPackage can improve even more, primarily by feedback from real implementations."

A few days later, Chris shared another insightful entry on Spatialite and GeoPackage: "One of the most important things for me was that it would be possible for implementors to build code to create a geopackage without requiring any special SQLite stuff. The core should just be a file format. And the file should be readable by any SQLite, not one compiled with special options or additional libraries. This means the core GeoPackage is far less than SpatiaLite. [...] Unfortunately SpatiaLite made some small changes so that as a Java programmer I can’t just use JTS‘s Well Known Binary parser, and it’s a similar story in OGR. And it’s the same case for any GIS vendor that has a WKB parser." Read the entry for more details on the differences and why it has / may have to be different.

And yes, there already is an open source libgpkg in the works!

The  pycsw  team  announces  the  release  of  pycsw  1.6.0.
The  1.6.0  release  brings  numerous  features,  enhancements  and  fixes  to  the  codebase,  including:
  *  Nabble  community  forum  now  available  via  OSGeo 
  *  fix  broken  connection  in  pycsw.admin.optimize_db
  *  native  PostGIS  geometry  support
  *  new  community  section  on  website 
  *  Web  Accessible  Folder  (WAF)  harvesting  support
  *  added  spatial  ranking  for  spatial  queries
  *  added  lxml  3  support
  *  fixes  for  new  OGC  CITE  tests
  *  added  support  for  SOS  2.0.0  harvesting
  *  added  support  for  SOS  1.0.0  harvesting
  *  added  database  specific  unit  tests
  *  added  support  for  nested  OGC  Filter  queries
  *  fixed  ISO  output/safeguarding  extent  elements
  *  fixed  parameterization  of  OGC  Filter  queries
  *  fixed  fulltext  search  to  dump  only  XML  element  values
  *  added  flexibility  to  pycsw.admin.setup_db  to  handle  use  cases  from  calling  applications,  like  specifying  extra  columns,  skipping  SFSQL  setup,  etc.
  *  added  support  for  ISO  19115-2  (gmi)  harvesting
  *  FGDC,  Atom,  and  DIF  are  now  core  supported  outputschema  formats,  and  do  not  need  to  be  explicitly  set  in  configuration
  *  added  CIDR  notation  support  for  CSW  transactions
  *  enhanced  link  support  when  harvesting  OWS  endpoints
  *  fix  tighten  Dublin  Core  writer  when  checking  on  dumping  XML
  *  fixed  harvesting  logic  for  unsupported  typenames
  *  fixed  GetRecords  typename  handling  to  _not_  behave  like  a  record  filter,  but  as  a  query  model
  *  harvesting  support  for  RDF  Dublin  Core
  *  fixed  Harvest  operation  parameter  checks  in  HTTP  GET  mode
  *  added  timeout  flag  to  pycsw-admin.py  post_xml  command
  *  continuous  integration  testing  (using  travis-ci)
  *  modular  Python  logging  capability
  *  paver  implementation  for  developer  tasks
The  full  list  of  enhancements  and  bug  fixes  is  available
This  release  also  moves  pycsw  forward  as  an  OSGeo  project  in  incubation.
pycsw  is  an  OGC  CSW  server  implementation  written  in  Python.
pycsw  fully  implements  the  OpenGIS  Catalogue  Service  Implementation  Specification  [Catalogue  Service  for  the  Web].  Initial  development  started  in   (more  formally  announced  in ).  The  project  is  certified  OGC  Compliant,  and  is  an  OGC  Reference  Implementation.
pycsw  allows  for  the  publishing  and  discovery  of  geospatial  metadata.  Existing  repositories  of  geospatial  metadata  can  also  be  exposed  via  OGC:CSW  2.0.2,  providing  a  standards-based  metadata  and  catalogue  component  of  spatial  data  infrastructures.
pycsw  is  Open  Source,  released  under  an  MIT  license,  and  runs  on  all  major  platforms  (Windows,  Linux,  Mac  OS  X).
Source  and  binary  downloads:
----------------------------------------

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / open data front:

• Here's an excellent and funny presentation of Leaflet: Past, Present and Future
• GitHub just added mapping capabilities: any GeoJSON file hosted on GitHub can be mapped with MapBox Streets 
• Mapnik 2.2.0 has been released
• Here's CLAVIN (Cartographic Location And Vicinity INdexer) is an open source software package for document geotagging and geoparsing that employs context-based geographic entity resolution (via O'Reilly Radar)
• A new book available, The QGIS Training Manual, by Rüdiger Thiede, Tim Sutton, Horst Düster, and Marcelle Sutton
• Here comes QGIS Enterprise, it's QGIS Desktop + Server + Web Client along with support and maintenance contract
• Yes, in QGIS 2.0 we'll get data-defined symbol properties, and here's on the new QGIS 2.0 APIs
• Mapbender has been resurrected into Mapbender3: "the back office software and client framework for spatial data infrastructures" 
• Something new, GeoThink.ca - Canadian Geospatial and Open Data Think Tank
• Here's some nice javascript examples dealing with projections and other geostuff, mostly from D3.js, some are pretty impressive
• Here's all OpenGeo presentations videos from FOSS4G-NA, and why not, here's the GeoServer presentation from GeoSolutions
• About the same time, OpenGeo also launched MapMeter, a monitoring tool for spatial deployments such as GeoServer
• From the gvSIG blog, I learned about available Emergency mapping symbology

From the Esri front:

• An entry named From ArcMap to ArcGIS Online: well-prepared geographic information for the web
• Here's the OGC summary of what happened with the GeoServices REST API standard submitted by Esri
• There's now ArcGIS Online admin tools available on GitHub
• News that Esri looks to link CAD Software to ArcGIS Online

From the Google front:

• Google announced today nothing less than 1,000 new Street View locations to Google Maps
• Road traffic information is important to Google, Google To Buy Waze For $1.3 Billion and the official Google announcement
• There was a Google ocean bathymetry update earlier this week
• Wonder what Google Glasses looks like inside? Via Make, here's What's Inside Google Glass
• That's a topic we mentioned before, recently discussed over Slashdot, How Google Street View Keeps an Eye on Things Where There Are No Streets
• A book's voyage recreated in Google Earth: “Sailing Alone Around the World” in Google Earth
• I tried the new Google Maps interface, and I admit, this is an excellent improvement

In the miscellaneous category:

• Via APB, the well known Stamen Design launched their Map Stack that makes designing maps free, easy and fun
• APB links to an article named The Revolution Will Be Live-Mapped: A Brief History of Protest Maptivism
• In case you missed it, Landsat 8 data is available for download since May 30th
• Earlier this week, Microsoft announced 270 terabytes of new Bird's Eye imagery
• Geoff mentions that the Time required to create 3D city models dropping rapidly, now less than a week for a textured 3D model of a whole city
• Google Glass will have competition, Atheer Offers a Wearable Display That's Glasses, Not Glass, but it's clearly not as sexy or wearable
• In Apple's iOS new 'Today' feature, there's Traffic Information on Frequently Visited Locations
• A quick one on 3D printing, "Anti-Gravity" 3D Printer Sculpts Shapes On Any Surface
• A generic article on drones / UAVs gathering location-based science data easier and cheaper than ever
• And now those drones can be accurately guided by thoughts 
• Frank at VerySpatial offers a long entry on the geography of cars
• The same site made me aware of the course on Teaching World Music with Geospatial Technology

In the maps category:

• Here's 5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is: median income, poverty line, inequality, food stamps, and diplomas
• Here's a Map of All American Rivers
• Funny name, WWF's ArkGIS: mapping the changing Arctic landscape
• Here's bedmap2, an ice and bedrock map Antarctica