Patience pays off... I've been reading about The Last Guy a new Sony game for some time. The premise: you are the last person on earth and need to fend for yourself against monsters through desolate cities. The big deal for geo types: it uses real imagery. Now, I'd read it was Google Maps imagery, Google earth imagery with no confirmation from Sony. Now, Wired makes it clear, it's just some good aerial and satellite imagery. Oh, and the game is out August 28.

Ars Technica interviews the CEO of Fwix an app that aggregates feeds for specific cities (26 now). Darian Shirazi is an ex-FaceBooker. The app, for now is Web-based, but an iPhone version is coming. The big "feature" for now is the ability to comment on a feed item. The feeds themselves involve jobs, events, news, etc. filtered from sources like "New York Times articles, Yahoo Upcoming events, Orbitz deals, Craigslist posts, Indeed job listings, Brightkite social network updates, geotagged Flickr photos, and even videos from YouTube and Vimeo." It's like FriendFeed for a city - but someone else, not you, picks the feeds. The business model is advertising based, but will be tied in time not just to geography but the specific feed.

A quick look at the Boston feed didn't excite me. The real key will be filtering down this massive "city life stream" to one's requirements.

Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and his team determined that cows and deer tend to align along the invisible lines when grazing or sleeping. The original work was aimed at determining if people do so, by looking at camp sites in Google Earth. Instead, they found cows that followed the "rules." The why and how are not yet known.

- NPR
- Abstract (fee for article) in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences

Continuing on its "too little, too late" strategy, MapQuest has tinkered with its home page. The team has updated the maps which now appear on the front page! Further the interface looks more, well, Google Maps-like with Traffic and Gas Buddy in buttons top right. Forms have been updated so you can toggle between a "key in" and "paste in" form. (Not sure why there can't be one for both...)

Bottom line: if you love MapQuest, these enhancements will be nice, if you use something else, these enhancements don't matter at all. For now the enhancements are on the "beta" site, but you can toggle back to the old one for comparison. Full details on the MapQuest blog.

Other reviews: Webware, Mashable

With this past weekend's Beijing summer olympics closing ceremonies the event goes into hibernation for another four years. What will we recall? Phelp's eight swimming golds? The Chinese taking more golds than another other country? A first olympic gold medal for Mongolia (in Judo)? Perhaps. But will anyone following the games say they learned a bit more about the world, about geography.


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