The United States Geological Survey National Geospatial Program “provides leadership for USGS geospatial coordination, production and service activities.” The National Map is one of several initiatives administered by the program . The National Map puts orthoimagery (aerial photographs), elevation, geographic names, hydrography, boundaries, transportation, structures, and land cover at the fingertips of users through its web viewer. The National Map is transitioning to a new method for delivering its products, making it ever more useful for professionals, teachers, students, and the general public. The new National Map Beta Viewer and Download platform recently made its debut. In addition to better product access, the new viewer lets you preview and download all National Map data and new US TOPO maps from one site. It will be interoperable with map viewers such as Google Maps, Bing!Maps, Google Earth using WMS, KML or ArcGIS. The viewer provides GIS tools to identify features, perform measurements and reverse geocode. For more information about features Introduction Letter Beta Information Sheet User Help/Support (QuickStart, FAQs, Contact Us). Useful tools like area measurement is provided free of charge, unlike the free version of Google Earth. The video below illustrates some of these features.
I encourage you to check out the new National Map beta viewer.
The folks at Google Earth are at it again. Like last year, they have created a folder under “Weather” that lets you track the progress of the current hurricane season. Included in this folder you’ll find updated storm tracks courtesy of the National Hurricane Center. The current position, predicted track, storm overview, NHS storm advisory, reference information, and a near real-time news gadget are also provided.
Twitter has become a phenomenon in the Web 2.0 universe. As many know, Twitter is a social messaging and microblogging site for staying connected to people in near-real time. Users send “tweets”, text-formatted posts of 140 characters in length to “followers”. Followers subscribe to these Twitter feeds, getting regular updates on their computers and smart phones. Twitter had been dominated by tech savvy Gen-Xers, Millennials, celebrities and well-known politicians like President Obama. The social networking site has experienced an explosion of subscribers using the service for a variety of different purposes.
I am developing a set of podcasts for introductory physical geography. These are mostly aimed at procedures used in most introductory physical geography lab courses. They are free to download and use.
Hurricane hunters are the “eyes in the sky” for those studying and forecasting hurricanes. The folks over at the Google Earth Blog describe how you can follow live hurricane recon missions, or see the results from recent missions using Google Earth. 
