SimpleGeo Powers Vicarious.ly: Maps “all” the LBS Social Media Checkins

Vicarious.ly, built on SimpleGeo’s development platform, collects “check ins” from BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter and puts them on a Google Map. The dots are symbolized by the app they are from but do not have personal info, just the location where “someone” checked in. For starters it works just in Austin, where SXSW starts this weekend.

This is part of the “all geo, all the time” buzz expected from that event.

- TechCrunch

FWHA ARRA Map

The White House Blog touts the Federal Highway Administration’s ARRA Map which locates and details 12,000 road projects funded by that program. I could not look at the map; it’s Silverlight based and crashed Safari.

- Whitehouse Blog via Gary Price

A Woman in GIS on PBS Kids Science Show

Mallory Peper is GIS specialist at Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Westwood Professional Services. Peper works with Westwood’s energy team to provide mapping and analysis for wind, solar and transmission projects.

She’ll be on the PBS series “SciGirls” this week. The show focuses on how girls think about science, technology, engineering and math and in this episode Peper and characters in the show visit two working wind farms to learn about wind power.

I don’t think we get that show in Boston :(

- North American Wind Power

MapQuest Links to FaceBook

There’s a new feature on MapQuest to make it simple to share maps, directions and places to your Facebook friends; MapQuest Share to Facebook.
- MapQuest Blog

For developers: the new platform V6 will be shown off at SXSW. Quick hit of the “wide range of Web services, each of which contain compelling, and in some cases, first-to-market features”:

Static Map Service

Place a map anywhere, with no code, just a Web address
Supports Web, wireless and printed map applications
Show points using a variety of MapQuest-provided icons or your own icons
A wizard to help create and customize the map image

Directions Service

Generate driving or walking directions for up to 50 locations at once
Find the fastest or shortest routes
Option to automatically re-order routes for the most efficient journey
Support for draggable routes, provide multiple alternate routes or routes based on time of day

Geocoding Service

Find the coordinates of a street address (geocode), or the street address from a set of coordinates (reverse geocode)
Provide up to 100 addresses at once in a single request (batch geocoding)
Ability to output results in a variety of easy-to-import formats for office tools

Traffic Service

Real-time traffic flow and incident reports to overlay on maps

Geographic Search Service

Search a radius, a map area, or a custom-defined polygon
Search along a route, by drive time, distance and by area
Use street addresses, map coordinates, or even IP addresses as the basis of search areas
Search within MapQuest provided data, or host data at MapQuest to be used in the service

- Dev Blog
- Press Release