Country Rebranding

Check out this cool flash animation about rebranding of countries!

Map Layers from All-Over

Creating maps that integrate data from all-over the place would be super-spiffy. You have corporate GIS data; you have beatiful Microsoft Virtual Earth imagery; you have functional google maps imagery.

OpenLayers is a Javascript API that is trying to bring all this stuff together. Unfortunately it has some pretty major usability issues to deal with.

This guy has a hack for adding your WMS imagery to a google map. See it in action here. An even better example is here (it brings together layers from TerraServer, Google, and a WMS). Or do it with Virtual Earth.

My short-term goal is simply to figure out how to join our corporate GIS data visually together with any WMS server. It may mean hacking, but hopefully not.

Microsoft Virtual Earth does 3D

Microsoft is trying to compete with Google Earth.

Local.Live.Com now has a "3D" version. It requires Internet Explorer, .Net 2.0 and other purely Microsoft tools. You'll have to trust an ActiveX control to get this view also.

Too bad it's only for Windows/IE; doing 3D in a webbrowser has so much potential.