I came across this awesome online tool from ito! that lets you visualise the changes made to OpenStreetMap for a specific area. You do need to register and then you can select your area of interest and see the changes made over the last configurable period. For example the additions made to Brisbane over the last 12 months: Click for full resolution. More...

If your interested in developing with the next generation visualisations of Silverlight on top of the Virtual Earth Web Service (VEWS) you can now download the Version 1 release of DeepEarth. http://www.codeplex.com/deepearth/ Visit our online sample site or watch the video:More...

The Microsoft Virtual Earth team will be at the Inman Real Estate Connect show in New York City, next week. I have two sessions and the 3rd will be done by my counterpart, Mark Merchant. Also, Matthew Quinlan, Virtual Earth Group Product Manager, will be participating in a panel about Real Estate Search. We’ll have a booth in the case that you want to stop by and chat, as well. The sessions are as follows: Wednesday, January 7, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm Virtual Earth at Work See how leading real estate companies are taking advantage of innovative tools and technology to create immersive websites that drive their business. {Merchant} Wednesday, January 7, 1:15 pm – 2:15 pm Leverage the Power of Virtual Earth to Gain Market Share Learn about the innovations and new technologies that drive revenue and generate better qualified leads using the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform -- on your desktop and on mobile devices. {Pendleton} Thursday, January 8, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm Boost Business Insight and Partnership Opportunities with Virtual Earth Learn about new ways to visualize buying trends, sales statistics, inventory data, and other metrics to gain valuable business insight and see how forward-thinking companies area deploying Virtual Earth on their Web sites and forming profitable partnerships that d

As Santa heads north for his annual slumber and we’re all left with buyer’s remorse and daunting credit card bills we can now reflect on something positive: how Christmas was changed this year for the better with a 3D version of tracking Santa using Microsoft Virtual Earth. And, hey, I was stoked – I got my application featured on MSN.com, so Merry Christmas to me! It started with The North Pole – A Virtual Earth Christmas Experience. Now, The North Pole Experience wasn’t that hard – Tom [Grimes] (and his Caligari friends) built the models, I crunched the map tile overlays and then wrote the code to pull everything together. But, tracking Santa was way more difficult because of the time constraints as to when Santa began his flight and when to end it, not to mention all of the coding behind ripping apart the GeoRSS file – well worth sharing. I’ll dig into this and actually provide you with my code (code junkies may skip to the end). I thought the biggest challenge for me was going to be figuring out when to start Santa flying and when to end him, but it turned out the parsing of a GeoRSS file for customization was more of a challenge. However, I used quite a bit of Virtual Earth functionality, so I figured this was just as good a place to document some of it