U.S. Senate to Investigate Web-based Micromarketing and Tracking

The New York Times is reporting today that the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee will hold hearings on how Internet marketers and ISP can track your surfing behavior.  Watchdog agencies are suggesting that some are violating federal law. NebuAd, an Internet marketing company that works with ISPs to help track web activity is providing a way for Web users to "opt-out" of being tracked. There was no discussion in the article of how ISPs are now geotargeting Web activity but some of those commenting on the article recognized the use of IP-based location-based advertising. Once you know ‘what’ and ‘who,’ the next question is always ‘where.’

Old Poll, New Poll

Back in May we asked: Who do you think is the top innovator in geospatial in 2008 so far? 230 people responded.

Google 34%
The open source geospatial community 21%
Another organization 20%
ESRI 17%
Nokia 5%
Microsoft 4%
TomTom 2%
Yahoo 0%

Next up: Has the jump in gas prices changed where you spend your time?

Pogue on iPhone GPS

The New York Times tech guru is not impressed:

The new iPhone has true G.P.S. now, too, in addition to the fake G.P.S. of its predecessor — an ingenious system that shows your location on a map by analyzing nearby cellphone towers and Wi-Fi hot spots.

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

On the whole he says it’s a nice upgrade, but much of it comes from the new apps, which can run on the old device.

Linux GPS/GIS Tutorial

James Gray writes an easy to follow tutorial: GPS and GIS: A Great Combination, Part I at the LinuxJournal. The GIS part is handled by QGIS.

GeoCommons Finder in Open Beta

It was in private beta for a while, but now everyone can play with Finder! the data sharing and download site. Data can be uploaded or download in shapefile, csv or KML. Or officially: “Finder is a browser-based application for finding, organizing and sharing GeoData in common formats.” And, there’s a shiny new User Guide (pdf).