A memo leaked to the Sunday Mail from the Scottish Ambulance Service details how drivers are to use maps over in car devices installed a year ago in 460 vehicles at the cost of L5 million. In particular the memo states:

"The system will guide you through the main route, which is not always necessarily the most direct or quickest possible.
"The systemis most effective once you are in close proximity to the address and is an aid to finding the correct location.
"A map route should always be used and should be available."

Saturday night the Ambulance Service stated:

"The satellite navigation system is not the primary navigational aide for staff.
"Drivers are advised to use ordinance survey maps and local knowledge.
"The mapping system we use, however, is constantly updated."

The devices were installed in reaction to an incident where an ambulance got lost and could not save a teen in a rural area after an accident in 2001. One paramedic clearly understands when the devices are helpful:

"It's only useful for finding remote or difficult locations like farms and country cottages or if you are lost.
"In most cases drivers know where they are going so there is no need to use it.

It'll be announced this morning at Where, but there's a blog post about first set of apps. Only a few are particularly spatial - WeatherBug weater, Caldwell Banker home search and speed traps from Trapster. As TechCrunch notes, it's odd that to get info on the API you must send e-mail rather than say read all the details then apply for a code or something. I guess Dash hasn't been watching how the rest of the tech community is doing APIs.

Rounding out the top five scoring units were the Garmin Nuvi 760 ($600), Garmin Nuvi 660 ($500), TomTom Go 920T, ($650), Garmin Nuvi 350 ($350), and Magellan Maestro 4250 ($400).

- Kansas City InfoZine

I ask that question based on a discussion of POIFriend.com, a site that let's anyone share points of interest with others for use in websites and GPS units. There are social aspects - visitors can comment, join groups, create avatars, and send updates to those who originate POI lists. Is that enough to make it a social networking site?

Also noteworthy: the site's business model: paid listings, but no ads.

- Digital Journal

The project is called 230 Miles of Love (that's the length of the UK's M6 highway). You can download, for free, "satcoms" short skits, that play (manually or automatically, depending on your satnav device). Some stories, reports the Guardian blog are more location connected than others. Donations for charity are accepted. I'm not sure how compelling this is, but clearly folks are looking for new ways to link "new media."

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and the Tampa Bay Estuary Program’s Manatee Awareness Coalition (MAC) want to save manatees. But for years, no mapping company's would put the manatee and homeland security zones in Tampa Bay on the navigation maps. But now Garmin is. The information is on all new chart plotters and updated SD cards.

Kipp Frohlich, leader of the FWC’s Imperiled Species Management Section, said “This marks a breakthrough that can save a lot of manatees. We tried unsuccessfully for years to get any mapping company to put the zones in their map covers. Garmin stepped up to the plate and did it.”

This is a great story and I do appreciate that Garmin stepped up, but if we all really want to save manatees, shouldn't this data be freely available to install on any unit? Perhaps that's naive and it's not how the boating navigation GPSs/charting tools work, but I thought I'd ask.

- TCPalm