Actually, not a new blog but a new URL. Chris Pendleton has been covering B2B and developer stuff related to VE for a long time here on MSDN. He has now moved over and is blogging here on all of the same areas, with even more focus on developer info. From coding tips like how to add drawing tools to your DHTML based web app to stories about how Virtual Earth customers are using the platform are found here. Last weeks pointer to the new neighborhood filtering functionality on John L Scott's site is pretty cool.

As always, for a list of blogs and other websites related to mapping, GIS and Local Search, poke around in the 'Favorites' folders in the right margin.  -->

And Finally, the 2007 US Open is underway at Oakmont. Here is a Collection highlighting the course. VE's measuring tools come in handy when studying golf courses on the web. from the author:

Here’s a collection of the holes at Oakmont, site of US Open wins for Bobby Jones in 1925, Hogan over Snead in 1953, Nicklaus over Palmer in 1962 for his first professional win, Johnny Miller’s closing round 63 in 1973, and Ernie Els in 1994

How We Built Britain is a series from the BBC exploring a thousand years of history and architecture [more info on series]. To help promote the program they've collaborated with Microsoft Research to create 6 amazing 3d photosysnths featuring 6 of the landmark buildings.

This Collection will guide you to the locations of the buildings in Virtual Earth. Click each pushpin's 'More Info' link to launch its associated photosynth. A few of the locations are covered with Birds Eye imagery, and for the others there is high res aerial imagery.

Trafalgar Square in Virtual Earth

Trafalgar Square in Photosynth
 

If you haven't tried Photosysnth out yet, this is an excellent place to get started.

Ed Katibah shares some early details on support for spatial data in SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) with Directions Magazine. Ed is the lead Program Manager for SQL spatial. In this interview he covers the two data models in Katmai, data import tools and more.

On a different subject, here's my favorite Birds Eye shot of the week courtesy of Virtual Globetrotting - a ship seen sinking from 3 different angles.

The Search team has added instant answers for traffic and maps to Live Search. They work pretty much the way you would expect; if you are at MSN.com or Live.com and do a search for an address or place, you should get an inline interactive map as the first answer. Likewise for queries for traffic conditions. There are a few neat features such as automatic location detection, which Matthew Cheung, one of our Program Managers, describes below-

• Enter the word “Map” and Live Search will try to automatically determine your current city and show you a map of your surrounding area
• Similarly, the words “Traffic” or “Commute” will show you’re the current traffic conditions around your area if available.
• The map is fully interactive, pan, zoom, adjust, or even see aerial imagery. Hover over traffic incidents for details.
• The traffic condition on the traffic answer doesn’t automatically update as time goes by, as it is not meant to sit on your desktop for continuous use (or it won’t be instant will it?). If you want to keep an eye out for the latest traffic, download the Vista traffic gadget for your sidebar.

Currently Rockets by Cat Power is playing

It was a busy week and i didn't have a great deal of time for posting, so here's a recap of some stuff I wanted to get to -

Seadragon and Photosynth at TED - Blaise Aguera y Arcas was the founder of Seadragon and currently a Live Labs Architect. Even if you have played around with Photosysnth, its fun to watch Blaise show it off in this 6 minute video from TED, along with some related technologies from Live Labs. amazing stuff!

Skyline matching - Myles Noton does a nice job matching a picture of the New York skyline from the top of the top of the Rock to the view in Virtual Earth. Some other interesting posts on his blog as well.

HDView Collection Grows - Matt has been adding to his Collection of HDView Panoramas. Cruise around the map to pick a location, then click 'More Info' in a pushpins popup to launch its spectacular 360 degree view. The most stunning scenes are far from the cities, like Michael Fischer's panorama from Mt. Rainier.

Birds Eye Imagery in London Launched - Finally, All of London has been photographed in Birds Eye. until now, we only had a small portion of the city covered.

City of Anaheim Virtual Ops Center - Covered on the VE for Gov blog yesterday, this applications shows layers of GIS data layered on Virtual Earth for web based visualization and sharing. James Fee adds some commentary on his Spatially Adjusted blog.

Where 2.0 review - Lots of mapping innovation and news coming out of San Jose this week from Microsoft, Google and many others. No shortage of online reading on the subject, but I'll point you to this article from Brady on the O'Reilly blog as he has some screenshots of the 3D interiors project that Microsoft showed at the conference.

As noted here recently, the latest release of MapCruncher can now render directly to S3, Amazon's storage platform, using Amazon's Web services. The Amazon Web Service blog posted this overview/review the other day highlighting the simplicity of publishing your own raster map layers on the web. Cruncher and S3 are a great combination that together remove the need to manage thousands of map tiles when building your application.

If you aren't familiar with MapCruncher, its a free application from Microsoft Research that takes plain ole pictures of maps (raster maps) in the form of a PDF, JPG, TIFF, etc... and turns them into a set of map tiles that can be used with Virtual Earth. Download it here and try it out.