Adena Schutzberg speaks with Amy Gahran, a conversational media consultant and content strategist based in Boulder, CO about maps and the media. The conversation ranges from how to pitch map-focused stories to the press to how to best serve journalists in this technology age. Schutzberg and Gahran also point out some "boo-boos" they've found and highlight great uses of maps in the media. This podcast runs nearly 30 minutes and was recorded March 13, 2008.

"[outside.in CEO] Johnson took the opportunity to describe his recent project: “Our project, Outside.in, is trying to build out the infrastructure for the geographic web. The fear in the 1990s is that no one would want to live in a city again because of the digital revolution, but the opposite has been true. The Internet is actually an urban location enhancing device. At the level of neighborhood and community, people care passionately about what is happening. People have a lot of expertise, a great deal of interest, and that zone is completely uncovered by traditional media."

"We built Outside.in as a service to help people see those conversations and use geotagging tools to tag different aspects of neighborhoods,” Johnson expanded. “We’re about to launch ‘on my radar’, which is basically the Facebook newsfeed applied to geography. We’ve been working with Yahoo and their new location technology Fire Eagle. It lets you enter your location and get back all the conversations happening within a certain radius. You can zoom out to see the whole neighborhood, the city, etc. So new tools can amplify what local experts on the ground have been doing traditionally by word of mouth."

This past week two of the many tech players with a toe in the geospatial waters, Apple and Yahoo, announced new developer offerings that will add to the twists and turns location based services have taken on the road to maturity. One of the services of the iPhone SDK is Core Location, meaning developers can develop native applications that take advantage of the pseudo-location abilities. We'll have a look at the iPhone SDK and Fire Eagle from a geospatial perspective plus explore what the real reason is for wanting navigation on your mobile device.