Navneet Kaushal reviews the panel on The Direction Of Local Search at SES Chicago 2007 (that's Seach Engine Strategies for those who don't follow the search arena). Reps from Ask.com (regular source for this blog Gary Price, with his Ask hat on), Yahoo and Urban mapping, among others seem to be challenging us to "think different" about local search.

- SearchNewz

The OGC yesterday announced (press release) it's time for regular folks to review and comment on its version of KML.

The release describes OGC KML as "a XML-based encoding schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future web-based online maps (2d) and Earth browsers (3d)." Comments are open until January 4, 2008.

I have no issue with the phrase; I know it means "without pattern" and is used, often in blogs and in online and print publications for situations that are not spatial. That's fine. My issue: when it's used with "literally" and there no map. That is, when its specificially mean to include a spatial implication, but there is no map! Case in point:

US Cities with the Worst Hotel Rate Inflation

The data is available. Neogeographers (and regular GIS orgs) offer tools to map that data likety split. So, why no maps? Perhaps this is a teachable moment? I offer this exercise for students: find a PR/news story that notes new geospatial data, but doesn't include a map. Make a suitable map with an online tool of your choosing.

vote in the Amazon Start-Up Challenge (ends Thursday)
Previous coverage: 1, 2

submit a proposal for a presentation at Directions Media's Location Intelligence Conference 2008 (closes next Friday)

Per Reuters:

TomTom, which makes navigation devices for cars and mapping software for handheld computers, says its users will be able to search for business addresses on Google Maps and transfer them to their TomTom device.

One upside for users:

TomTom's devices include "points of interest" - such as restaurants, petrol stations and parking garages - but if a user has not regularly bought map upgrades, such data can become out of date.

The article notes that this intermediary step will help TomTom hold users as more and more satnav devices gain Internet connectivity and cell phones get more mapping solutions.