Here’s another super helpful trick to make it easy to keep up on news events being reported via KML. Ideally, timely information with a Geographic component would be published via GeoRSS feeds which would make it easy to consume in standard RSS readers. But often KML files are used instead as is the case of this ongoing account of the war between Georgia and Russia. The downside is that there is no easy way to be alerted when the author makes an edit or addition.

Live Maps has an easy fix for this. You can pluck an RSS feed for any KML file you are viewing at our site. Star by viewing the KML. Use the Mapurl parameter to specify the KML file you want to view like this:

http://maps.live.com/?mapurl=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=1217876

Once it loads, hit the subscribe  link to get your RSS feed

Add the resulting feed to your newsreader and you’re all set; Changes to the Source KML file will show up in your RSS reader. As a bonus, the resulting feed is actually a GeoRSS feed as opposed to a vanilla RSS feed so you can use it in any application that can consume GeoRSS as well