Recently, Engaget shared rumors of TomTom developing it's own GPS module for the iPhone, while the new Google 'My Location' feature now works with the iPhone. Forget TomTom and Google, here's a third-party GPS add-on for the iPhone and iPod Touch that will start shipping in February at the price of 89$US. The great news: the software used is open source, the bad news: it requires your iPhone/iPod Touch to be 'jailbroken' (maybe this will change with the upcoming SDK?). The description: "The iPhone locoGPS module allows jail broken iPhones to finally have GPS functionality. This module is in development and will be shipping in February. All software is open source and more applications are being written every day. The locoGPS module gives you the ability to explore all the benefits of GPS from a device that is small enough to put on a keychain." Of course, you can wonder if the iPhone really needs a GPS, use OpenStreetMap data instead of Google's, read KML/GeoRSS directly on the iPhone.

Google's official Lat Lon Blog announced the addition of shaded terrain to their free Google Maps site. In addition to adding the Terrain button, they've removed the Hybrid button, combining it the Satellite one. A single look at it is enough to convince anyone this is very welcomed even if Yahoo! Maps, Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Ask.com Maps offered something similar for quite some time. Also released this week, Google Maps searches are now providing a thumbnail of the related street view photo, and arguably a major new feature, the My Maps feature somehow becomes Our Maps, allowing to collaborate directly on someone else's My Maps, this has a lot of potential of getting big, and last, you can more easily share KML and KMZ files and GeoRSS feeds through My Maps. From the Our Maps announcement: "Just click the "Collaborate" link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They'll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it, as long as they are signed into a Google Account that's associated with that email address. You can also open your map to the world so anyone can edit it by selecting the "Allow anyone to edit this map" checkbox." Competition is not sleeping, Microsoft had a recent major release of Virtual Earth in addition to 33.7 Terabytes of new worldwide imagery.

Microsoft unveiled their new version of Virtual Earth, and it's major. The Google Earth Blog actually reported this story yesterday. My apologies to the blog's author. Here's the official Virtual Earth blog entry. SharpGIS offers a few interesting screenshots. Ogle Earth also has his own interesting report. Amongst the juicy improvements, there is GeoRSS support, GPS GPX support, and even Google's KML format support (this format in being standardized by the Open Geospatial Consortium, which Microsoft just rejoined), there's Bird's eye view in 3D and even a SketchUp competitor in for 3D modelling. A longer more detailed list can be found here in the Virtual Earth Developer Forum.

Can you improve something great? Yes. Google Maps just 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, 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 announcement: "To start we now support GeoRSS as a data format for geographic content in Google Maps. We want to enable users to create data in whatever format is most convenient for them, and feel that by supporting both KML and GeoRSS we can enable a wider variety of people and applications to contribute content to Google Maps."

Based on Wikipedia's enormous success, does one can believe Wiktionary is destined for the same treatment? I find it very useful and even contribute sporadicly. I'm trying to find out if my time spent contributing is worthed. The Wiktionary wikipedia article is quite informative and helped me understand Wiktionary's context and competition. This picture shows Wiktionary really took off last year and the curves clearly show traffic is rising significantly. Slashdot has not discussed Wiktionary yet.

After a lot of discussion, comments and even a poll. SalshGISRS.org has been renamed slashgeo.org

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