Update: 6/4/08: The official announcement came out Monday night. You can read it here.

On quick read I offer these observations. The organization is following the "Council on Federal Procurement of Architectural and Engineering Services (COFPAES) Model of organization, whereby COGO will undertake legal or advocacy action only through unanimous agreement of all of the Member Organizations."

It's an odd set of tweets: it consists entirely of posts like this:

"What is coastal prairie?: Read for the answer to this question. http://tinyurl.com/69v9tg"

The link goes to a USGS FAQ page. For the full list see the full feed.

Interesting marketing effort or annoying use of Twitter?

Adrian Holovaty writes at the Everyblock blog and MediaShift Idea Lab about new Everyblock "special reports." The idea is to take news that doesn't necessarily fit elsewhere and "geocode it" and place it into local news searches. (Recall Everyblock is a hyperlocal news site for Chicago, New York and San Francisco.)

The first such report geocodes locations in a recent FBI bribery report. Good stuff. The sad part is this is "just good journalism" but clearly we need a specialty site to do this sort of work. Perhaps in time this will be standard fare for local news. No word on tech for this operation.

The China Journal blog of the Wall Street Journal cites a new kind of censorship in that country. It seems that pages of controversial maps, artwork and coverage of dissent in the May issue of National Geographic's English edition were glued together in a new sort of censorship. Nat Geo is still trying to make sense of the event:

Beth Foster, the magazine’s director of communications, says, “It appears that someone connected with local magazine distribution in Asia glued together a few pages of the May English-language issues of National Geographic magazine that were shipped into China. We have not gotten to the bottom of the specifics of this isolated activity, but we have had no communication from or with the Chinese government about this matter.”