Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! Now Support GeoRSS

Lord Satri writes "This week, Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!'s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard. As for KML, Google Earth's file format, this new Google Maps integration is not unrelated to the recent announcement of internet-wide KML search capabilities within Google Earth. From the GeoRSS website: 'As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds. To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities.'"

No Mac or Linux?

[oyenstikker]

How is it that Firefox is supported on Windows but not other platforms? Can Firefox on Windows use ActiveX?

GeoURL

[Toba82]

Looks like GeoURL [geourl.org] is about to get eclipsed pretty badly. It was fun while it lasted.

Re:No Mac or Linux?

[HoosierPeschke]

Contrary to how it looks like it installs on Firefox, it's not an addon, it's a plugin.

On top of that you need ADMINISTRATIVE rights to install.

Here's the xpi [microsoft.com] for your viewing pleasure.

I haven't been able to extract the exe yet (using uniextract) to see what that might contain.

OpenLayers also supports GeoRSS

[foniksonik]

OpenLayers, an open source (BSD License) javascript library for generating your own maps. [openlayers.org], also supports the GeoRSS standard.

If you ever wanted to use your own set of tiles for a map... this is the software for you. FYI IANADeveloper on it but if you're good with RICO or Prototype you should be. We all need an alternative mapping system that is mature and ready for general use out there for applications that may differ from the norm (like a map of something other than the earth... a building for instance).