NYU School of Medicine Virtual Microscope

Created by the NYU School of Medicine the Virtual Microscope uses the Google Maps API to display and navigate scanned slides of microscopic images. Students and faculty members who are logged into the school's Learning Management System can even add markers to the slides to annotate and comment on slide features.

The site even comes with its own 'hot or not' feature which allows students to rate the slides (at the moment the most popular is a slide of the intestinal helminthic infection Trichuris trichiura - as if you hadn't guessed). The slides also come with a 'link-to-view' button which allows students to save or share links to a specific image, location within the slide and zoom level.

There are currently 246 slides available for viewing.

Via: Ogle Earth

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Live Piracy Map 2008

This is rather a topical map, what with the Sirius Star currently being held hostage off the coast of Somalia with $100m dollars of oil on board. This Live Piracy Map 2008 by the International Chamber of Commerce purports to show all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2008.

As you might expect there is a large cluster of incidents around Somalia but the biggest cluster seems to be off the coast of Yeman. As a rough guide it seems to me the closer you are to the equator the more likely you are to meet a pirate.

Via: Mibazaar

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MyGeoPosition

MyGeoPosition is a great application to help you geo-code a single address. From my limited testing it seems very accurate.

Apart from its accuracy, the site offers a number of really useful facilities for geo-coding a position and for how you might then want to use the data:

• Finetuning of the position using a drap & drop marker
• Geoposition as float or in degrees
• Setting an inaccuracy (~1m, ~10m, ~100m, ...) for data protection reasons
• Automated creation of geo-metatags for websites and weblogs
• Automated creation of geotags for websites, weblogs and images
• Automated creation of kml files (Google Earth)
• iGoogle gadget for quick geocoding from your personal landing page
• Slim design, quick loading process

As well as all these features the site returns a website url so it is possible to create a simple link to an address. If you don't want to link to MyGeoPosition, that's covered as well, as MyGeoPosition creates links to the location on Google Maps, Microsoft Live Local and Yahoo Maps.

The site is available in English, German, Dutch and Bulgarian.

Posted by Brandon Bilinski, Google Data APIs Team

Since the Atom Publishing Protocol specification was finalized, we have been working on making the Google Data APIs compliant with the AtomPub standard. As of today, we are releasing a new version of most of our services that achieves full compliancy with RFC 5032.

If you're worried this this may break your current application, rest easy. This change will only be available in API version 2 and higher. If you are happy with the current version, you can keep doing what you've been doing and the API will continue to work as it always has. If instead you'd like to use the AtomPub compliant version (and the new v2 features), just specify API version 2 in an HTTP header, and you're good to go.

One of the new v2 features is the use of HTTP ETags for optimistic concurrency. ETags are a web standard that work well with HTTP caching. The client libraries that support version 2 will handle ETags automatically, but if you are interested in how ETags look at the protocol level, check out the details in the Google Data Protocol Documentation. Some services are using V2 to introduce additional improvements as well (for example, YouTube's new geo-search feature), so be sure to check out the documentation for your favorite service to see what's new.

For those of you who'd like to try out version 2 in our client libraries, the Java and .NET client libraries have been updated with V2 support. To see a list of the services who are V2 compliant and to find out how to migrate your apps to the new version, check out our migration guide. We recommend migrating to v2 if you can, as any future improvements will be introduced to version 2 and higher. For further information about the release, please check out the new Google Data documentation or head over to our discussion group.