Hey Folks,

To say that last week was a blur is to employ understatement at its  
finest.

There is a lot that came out of Where 2.0 and Wherecamp that directly  
affects this discussion and I've been doing my best to digest it all.  
Here are some of the highlights:

Google
REST-based API for GeoSearch (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje
)
Flash API for Maps
Feature/Layer Enhancements to Google Maps (Real Estate, Photos,  
Wikipedia, et al)
Google Friend Connect

Yahoo
Yahoo Internet Location Platform (http://developer.yahoo.net/geo)

Placebase/Pushpin
Free REST-based API for US place data, including some interesting  
demographic info
        http://www.pushpin.com/api/docs/rest/
This could be the basis of some really interesting mashups;  a Twitter  
Caste Map, anyone?? :)

Skyhook/Loki
Announced locationaware.org, an initiative to try to get a Javascript-
based standard for location-detection capability in the browser.  This  
is an important part of the location puzzle and the personal project  
of Ryan Sarver at Skyhook.

These are the things which most stood out to me.  If anyone has any  
other things that I've missed which contribute significantly, please  
say so.

The Google REST API is particularly significant, and I'd like to see  
what people's experience is using this for various kinds of geosearch.

Also, it turns out that Google is employing the GeoHash algorithm I've  
been pushing to do spatial searching using BigTable.  Since database  
schemes like BigTable don't support traditional GIS extensions/spatial  
indexes, GeoHash allows for a simple bounding box search using  
truncated GeoHash substrings.  I will post separately about this  
shortly, as I am working on some GeoHash tools to expand this  
functionality.  This is of particular interest to AppEngine developers.

Shaoib Burq and I are working on a YILP (Yahoo Internet Location  
Platform) gem for Ruby which should be available in the next couple of  
days.  This is a nice geocoding platform from Yahoo that expands on  
their "Where On Earth" platform.  Every location on earth has a unique  
WOEID, which is a nice, hierarchical way of dealing with locations and  
neighbor relationships.  We'll announce this gem soon but in the  
meantime you can check out the api.

More in a moment.  Now that the Where Week is over some of our other  
members should have some time to pitch into the conversation as well.

Dave