Under a somewhat confusing title ("Bike Racers Gear Up With Geodata"???), Wired describes the effort of the Amgen Tour of California bike tour organizers to make the event "watchable" on the web, with help from the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC).

"This is more than just GPS," says CSC's Identity Labs chief technologist Dan Munyan. "This is object field tracking. We want to be able to focus on a field of objects in motion, looking not only at where they are on the route, but also where they are relative to each other.

Some time ago I wrote in Location Intelligence about a similar effort in sailboat racing.

Slashdot reports that in preparation for the Google flyover of Sydney, a number of dotcoms spent hours making huge signs that would be visible from the air.

Is this spam?

When blogger Ron Pristas read the story about the UK Royal Mail delivering a letter with only a map, he decided to put the US Postal Service to the test. And when he got the letter back as undeliverable, he did not give up but tried mailing it again from a different facility. Ron's persistence paid off! The envelope is now in the hands of its intended recipient.

I just saw this on ZDNet: According to the updated Google Maps API Terms of Use, there is a limit of 50,000 geocode requests per day per Maps API key. If you exceed this 24-hour limit, the Maps API geocoder may stop working for you temporarily.

This is likely to affect users with popular mashups that rely on this feature.

[Update] Mea culpa. Thanks to reader Frank Taylor, who pointed out that the 50,000 requests per day per Maps API key is not new. There is some new language in Google's updated Terms of Use describing what might happen to those who exceed the limit (geocoder might stop working temporarily), which hardly warrants a blog post. As I keep telling my son, haste makes waste...

A long thread on Slashdot about Windows Local Live. One user's opinion:

"If this is really true M$ seems to have no clue as to what to do next. This seems to be a huge $ sink - and something that I just can't see anyone wanting to use."

I know that Slashdot is falling out of favor on this forum, but I thought I'd let you know that Benton Yetman's Directions Magazine article on GIS and Robotics is top of Slashdot at this very moment.