James Fee GIS Blog

Phillip Holmstrand continues to improve his batchgeocoding.com website.  He’s added bulk reverse geocoding using Google’s geocoder.  Google’s advantage over  Yahoo is it also includes an ”accuracy” field so you can get feedback on your geocodes. Plus Google has rooftop geocoding in many cities making it much more accurate than Yahoo or TIGER/Line based geocoders. Its Alright?

The Yahoo! Brickhouse closing put some projects in jeopardy, but apparently Fire Eagle is “alive and well“. Rest assured that whilst Brickhouse may be gone, Fire Eagle itself lives and thrives within the Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group.  Fire Eagle has been, and will continue to be, a core component of Yahoo’s Geo Technology and User [...]

Vish wonders aloud if we are close to using online tools to replace ESRI’s venerable Model Builder.

Yahoo! announced some updates to GeoPlanet including GeoJSON support.  Yahoo! seems much more quiet than most companies about their endeavors (Fire Eagle, GeoPlanet, Pipes) and I’m glad to see them improving given the pressures they are under these days.  I really like how GeoPlanet is organized and I hope it (and Fire Eagle and Pipes) [...]

The Yahoo/Microsoft/Google quagmire hasn’t stopped Google from separating out their geospatial blog from their search blog. The Y! Geo blog has started up today and possibly points to Yahoo! pushing more of the geospatial technology out. In addition they’ve announced their Yahoo! Internet Location is now called Yahoo! GeoPlanet. The Y! Geo blog seems to [...]

I guess interesting stuff does come out of Where 2.0. Simply put, the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform creates an ID called WOEID (Where On Earth ID) for every location on earth and has an API to geocode back and forth from that WOEID. In simple terms, the Service allows you to look up the unique [...]

So how the heck are you guys doing it? Google Maps and Virtual Earth have so much distortion up there (or down there as the case may be) that mapping is very difficult. Plus what happens when they navigate off the edge of the map? Anyway the closest thing I’ve found with decent polar projections [...]

The word via PlanetGS is that Yahoo! has a new update to their mapping tool. Dan Catt has probably the best overview I’ve seen so far. I used to use Yahoo! Maps religiously, but since Google Maps has come out, I just don’t really bother anymore (other than to georeference photos in Flickr). I switch [...]

It looks like people are able to do wonderful things with the Flickr API and a four color United States map. Click over to the blog post link above for a better view of this map I’d love to see this mashed up with the “Earth at Night” image and see what happens.

Yep you read that right. The latest Arc2Earth version has a new toolbar called Map Tile Layer which allows you to download into ArcMap Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps and Ask Map tiles. So you can now choose Aerial/Hybrid/Streets for each of these services (NASA World Wind and Terraserver will be added at a later [...]

I was playing around with the web album feature of Picasa and how Google Earth integrates into it. The ease of geocoding the photos was very easy and a snap, yet the web portion makes me wonder if this will really take off. I’m a big Flickr user and frankly the limitations of Google’s Web [...]

I had gotten an email from IDELIX and promptly ignored it as their idea sounds like a hassle given the simplicity and ease of use Google Maps and Virtual Earth offer us. Well after a weekend of seeing everyone post about it I thought I’d give it another look. Well I think I was correct [...]

I know everyone can’t bear to read another Yahoo!/Google Local/Live Local/Ask.com/Mapquest review but here is one.

About time! I actually use Yahoo! maps more than probably all the rest because I like the interface. Now I can at least take a look at imagery from areas I’m traveling to. The imagery isn’t as detailed as Google’s or ESRI’s in urban areas, but it does seem better in rural Texas where my [...]

It wouldn’t be February in Tempe unless we knew Spring Training and the Cactus League was starting up. In the spirit of the season, I walked down to the local Borders bookstore to take a look at the new Baseball Hacks book from O’Reilly. I just can’t get enough baseball stats and this book really [...]

The news out of Yahoo! this morning is that they have released their User Interface Library which inluces a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript under a BSD license and their Design Pattern Library under a Creative Commons license. On top of that, they also have started up the Yahoo! User Interface Blog [...]