Here’s a couple of interesting development on the Google Geography department. First, the quick news item: Google has dropped Navteq as one of its mapping data providers (i.e., companies that provide street, point-of-interest, and routing data) in favor of continuing to do business with Tele Atlas. This is not unexpected since Navteq was recently acquired by Nokia and the industry movement of these two companies in the past year have made them competitors of each other. This latest move by Google was first revealed last Friday, September 19, in a blog post by Mike Blumenthal. The announcement from Google Maps Guide Adam contained this snippet:

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Whee! I won the Best Single Blog Post Award for the Technology Category in the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards. The post that won is the nosebleed-inducing “The Making of Lakbayan (Part 2)”. Well, it’s not a complete achievement since that particular post was a self-nomination (I figured correctly that it’s harder to win in the Best Blog Division and that people will overlook the Best Single Blog Post Division so I banked my chances there ). But, I’m still chuffed to have won and I also have to acknowledge Benj for actually nominating the related post, “Lakbayan”, for the same category. His nomination actually gave me the idea to nominate the more technical “Making of” post. So thanks, Benj!

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For the Bloggers’ Choice Award of the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards that is. As you may or may not know, Filipino Voices recently emerged as one of the Top 12 Emerging Influential Blogs of 2008. While I have already voted for this group blog in that writing project, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw my support again to Filipino Voices for the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards.

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There’s still no official announcement from Google (Update, September 6: now, there’s a blog post), but readers of Google Earth Blog noticed new and updated satellite imagery in Google Earth. As usual, there’s a lag time before the data is updated in Google Maps so you won’t see the new imagery on the web yet (well, except if you have the Google Earth browser plugin).

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Remember the Wikimedia illustration-for-pay project I blogged about last year? Hmmm, maybe not. (So read that blog post! Go on. I’ll wait.) anyway, the first round of illustration requests started last month and will run until early October. There are 50 needed illustrations in various fields such as biology (jellyfish cross-section), mathematics (Császár polyhedron), engineering (airborne wind turbine), and computer science (application virtualization). All but two of the illustrations will have a payout of $40 while the remaining will be worth $15.

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