This amazing image was captured randomly while Seattle was being flown to capture Birds Eye coverage last year. 

Although this is my favorite I have seen thus far, it is one of many images of things caught in flight I have been collecting, many found on Birds Eye Tourist

The V1 spec for GeoRSS is out, coincidentally just about a year from its inception. GeoRSS is an Extension of RSS that allows the author to encode geographic information in the feed, from simple points to more complex geometry. From Raj Singh of OGC:

Barely a year after embarking on this effort, we are releasing GeoRSS version 1:
http://www.georss.org/1/

Congrats to everyone who worked so hard to make v1 a reality!

If you're interested in using GeoRSS in your applications, read about Virtual Earth's support for the standard in our Interactive SDK. Open the 'Use Pushpin Layers' folder to get started quickly.

It used to be that if you needed to create presentation quality shaded area maps you had to spend thousands of dollars on a GIS or Business mapping package and the data that was required to fuel it. Esri's Arc products for instance are really powerful, but are far too complex and costly for most of us to get into. When Microsoft released MapPoint 2000 for about 250 bucks, the average person could create nice looking data driven maps like this:

Lets say you have a spreadsheet with a column of zipcodes and a column of crime incidents for each zipcode. With MapPoint you can just drag that spreadsheet into the map and you instantly have a shaded color coded map showing where Crime is high versus low.

But what if you don't want to spend 250 bucks or your needs are modest and you only need to make one or Two maps? Streets and Trips, MapPoint's younger sibling, is a pretty good deal at 35 bucks. It doesn't have the data mapping ability, but it has nice tools for drawing shaded areas which is perfect for a one-timer.

And what if 35 bucks is still more coin than you want to drop? at this point you may think I'm about to sell you a Ginsu knife. But Instead, I'm going to show you the new drawing features in Live Local that let you create shaded area maps on the web and share them with as many people as you want - for free. Here is a map I made today showing the King County Council Districts for 2006:

I sketched up each territory using the drawing tools that are built right into Live Local, adding each to a Collection. For each District I specified a link to the Council members website and included each of their photos. For color, I assigned each a random color from the provided palette. On its own, this is already quite useful - the County could provide a link to this map on their website, allowing me to find out my district and contact my council member just by typing my address into the search field.

What if I wanted to assign each district a color or style based on some criteria, as in the crime example above. Perhaps I want to highlight the Democratic districts in one color and the republican districts in another. Easy! I can just just select a territory by clicking on its edge, then assign it a new fill color, line color or line style on the provided palettes like this:

As you hover over each Color or Line style you will get a realtime preview on the map of what your territory will look like. then just click to select. How about sharing the map with others? Once again, Easy! Assuming they have a web browser (yes, they do) they have everything they need already. Live Local will generate a personal permalink for your collection that you can email to others or post on your blog or website. On the Scratchpad use the 'Share' menu to email the permalink, or copy it to the clipboard to paste in other applications.

and remember, permalinks are a powerful way to send someone a map with many other features turned on. If I want to send you my district map with a layer of all of the Home Depot stores in the area, It would look like this. and if I want to turn on the real time traffic flow layer, I would send you this.

Using Map Cruncher, this sites creator turns standard High Res digital photos into interactive 'map' layers. The Virtual Earth map Control is then used as the viewer, allowing you to fluidly pan and zoom into the image. Try it out. You'll start here:

and be able to zoom in far past here:

Explore his site - there is more to see and more on the way.

Last year the Register broke a story that Microsoft had eradicated Apple HQ from our map. We thought we could get away with it but didn't expect to run into investigative journalists out there of the caliber employed by the Register. Foiled again! This made our management team reconsider our strategy with respect to aerial imagery- It was decided to deploy the fleet of Microsoft Blackhawks to capture the highest resolution imagery possible of all of MSN's competitor's headquarters and monitor them 24/7.  While we were at it, we photographed each location from 4 different angles allowing us to rotate our view to monitor them from North, South, East and West.  The first intel from our recon is in, and it has been revealed that no one actually works at the Googleplex given the barren parking lots.

Of course, this is all just a stepping stone towards our ultimate goal.

But seriously, the new Birds Eye imagery in San Jose and the valley looks amazing.

Windows Live Local - Wow, that name is really Microsoftian. If I were a developer and built something as awesome as Windows Live Local, I’d be pretty upset at the marketing genius that named that. Or marketing robot, which is highly probable. Bad name aside, here is another product that simply blows away Google’s version. This maps tool is way more powerful than I realized. It has similar quality maps to Google and Yahoo, but there are a series of tools that make Local stand out. You can annotate and share maps, draw multi-point maps (something I’ve wanted to do in Google Maps for forever), and add local search results to your map. Performance seemed to suffer a little bit with all the dragging and dropping and animating, but I wasn’t testing this on the fastest machine in the world.

couldn't have said it better myself.

We passed a big mile marker tonight on our journey to provide the best mapping and local search service on the net. As I write this, our 4th major release of Live Local is making its way through the tubes and is rolling out to our data center. Lots of cool and useful stuff, some never before seen in a major mapping website. Assuming some wise guy doesn't try to dump something on the internet like its a truck, by the time you read this you'll be able to enjoy people searching, map drawing and tons of new Birds Eye imagery on Live Local.

Lets start with people search. At the top of the page are the search controls. Select 'People' as the type of search, then Enter a name and a place to begin the search. Like this:

Hit the search button and the map should update and a results panel appears with matching names. Results for People searches work just like a business search - Drag the map or zoom in and the queries will all refresh. You can have up to three queries active at a time, and you can mix and match between people and businesses. You can also search by phone number - just enter a 10 digit number in the first field and hit search to find the corresponding listing.

Draw on your maps. In the last release of Live Local we introduced the Collection feature, allowing you to draw a series of pushpins on the map, save them, and easily share them with others via a simple perma-link. With this release, we've extended Collections with the ability to add lines and closed shapes to your map. Along with the familiar pushpin tool on the Scratchpad, you'll now find a bunch of drawing tools like this:

You have control over line thickness, fill color, line color and line pattern. You can draw multi-segment lines or complex closed shapes. While its not exactly Adobe Illustrator, it is quite an impressive set of basic drawing and editing tools all implemented in Dynamic HTML; No plugins required, and it works very well in Firefox 1.5 (Windows, Mac, Linux), IE6, and IE7. Here's a Collection I am working on of the major neighborhood boundaries in Manhattan.

In the image above, I have clicked on one of my polygons, placing it in edit mode. In this mode you can drag the vertices around to reshape your line or polygon. You can also split a segment and add a node by right clicking on it like this:

There's a lot more to this feature area - I'll try to post a full tutorial here in the next day or so. until then, dive in and have some fun with this. Its a great way to maintain Collections of your hiking, biking or running trails, creating sales territory maps, or illustrating something for a friend on a map that would have otherwise been difficult to convey. I'm looking forward to seeing some Collections appearing at PassThePOI that make good use of these new features.

Send to Phone and Call for Free. The Previous release of Live Local introduced a feature that allowed you to dial any business in the US free of charge. We've now added the ability to Send a Text message to your phone with a business listing's details. Here I have searched for Bicycle repair in Phoenix AZ

When I hover over any of the search results I get options to Call the business for Free or to SMS their details to my mobile. Call for Free is slick in that it works with any phone by dialing you and the business simultaneously. Selecting Send to Mobile brigs up a dialog for you to enter the mobile phone you want to send the listing to, like this:

Check off the 'Remember Me' option to have the phone number stored in a cookie for rapid re-use.

New Birds Eye Imagery. We've added dozens of new cities with birds eye coverage in this release. San Diego, Portland, Milwaukee, ... here is a growing Collection of them with the newest additions at the end. Lots of smaller cities have been added and many cities where we had coverage in the past have been greatly expanded. Check out Washington DC for instance, where coverage extends deep into the burbs. Also, in many cases it is really the entire county that is covered and not just the cities listed, so just use the pushpins as a start point for exploration.

Other enhancements include adding hundreds of thousands of new WiFI access points to our database used for triangulation. So if you are using the 'Locate me' feature on a Laptop or Origami, your determined location will be more accurate than ever. We didn't forget about our Developer community either. This release adds support for drawing Polygons to the API, and fixes a number of bugs reported over the last cycle. The industries most extensive geographic support for geocoding and routing has grown as well.  

Some time back, James Fee was complaining that he couldn't see his office in Virtual Earth. In a recent planning meeting where it was being decided what cities should be included in the next Birds Eye Update, everyone wanted wanky cities like Chicago and Charlotte. But I went to bat for James and made a case for Tempe. yea, I'm sure it was a career limiting move and I'll pay for it later, but now we can all keep an eye on James. James - If you're reading this, usual and customary payment for shuffling a city to the top of the Birds Eye list is a pound of M&M's ;-) 

And for the rest of you, check out all of the new Birds Eye cities that came online tonight. Cordoba Spain is looking beautiful. Here is a Collection of most all of the Birds Eye cities in the US, with new ones towards the bottom including Tempe, San Diego, Milwaukee, Rochester, and dozens more. I have some more to add so keep your eye on the list.  

At this years Inman Connect Conference, one of the most influential events in real estate, a tract was added specific to technology, the biggest component of which was Location technologies. I think this was a great indicator of how the industry is changing. Mapping has long been a major part of any good Real Estate site; But over the last 2 years there has been a definite shift towards maps and location technologies becoming even better integrated into these websites. No longer just for the display of a properties location, geography is often a first class citizen in the search and discovery of potential houses and properties, not to mention neighborhood exploration. In the Virtual Earth business unit, we've seen a whole bunch of growth in adoption of the VE platform over the last year for real estate based apps. Not just with industry giants like John L. Scott, Loopnet and HomeStore/Move, but new names like Zillow and ZipRealty who are looking to innovate fast.  Zip, one of the largest discount brokerages in the country, is the latest website building on the VE platform. Previously they employed maps, data, aerial imagery, and geocoding from a number of vendors to build the map features on their site. Its a lot of added effort to cob together a solution across so many different API's. This week Zip simplified their IT lives significantly by turning to VE. Not only didn't they lose functionality by writing to the Virtual Earth API's, they actually gained features like Birds Eye Imagery display that aren't available anywhere else.

On a discussion Panel at Inman I mentioned that as far as we've come, there is still so much more to do in this field, especially in the area of neighborhood exploration. I'm a little concerned that I made just about the exact same statement 5 years ago and we're just getting there today, but so be it :-) The neighborhood that a house is built upon is one of the most important factors a buyer considers. Maps, when properly augmented with neighborhood information, can be a great tool for getting to know the area you are considering buying. Where is the bus line? is there a supermarket nearby? are the schools decent? No one knows a neighborhood better than the residents. Tools Like Collections at Live Local will are making it easy to share the vibe of a neighborhood via maps. Here is a Collection I made highlighting some of the best features of my Neighborhood. Spatial information like this viewed over birds-eye quality pictures of the region go a long way to letting a potential buyer get a feel for the neighborhood. Imagine a system of similar Collections built by other residents of the neighborhood, all aggregated into a common interface. How useful would that be when choosing your next home?