In what appears to be the first use of “GeoRSS” in a book title, there is an upcoming book “Practical Google Maps Mashups with Google Mapplets, GeoRSS and KML”. The book won’t be published until this September, and isn’t yet listed on the Apress site, but you can see the Amazon listing here.

While this is the first title that includes “GeoRSS”, searching across Amazon shows 22 results when searching for term “GeoRSS”. Google Book Search shows 90 results. However, it doesn’t appear to have a way to return the number of unique results, so my book shows up twice, and Google Maps Hacks has the English and Japanese versions.

Looking over the categories of books that mention GeoRSS, there is a very good selection. The most prevalent, and obvious, are mashup and programming books. There is a Mac OS X Leopard book, assumedly referring to the included Dashboard widget. There are a number of surprising (and incorrect) results, such as “A Unsocial Socialist”, which is actually an incorrect OCR for “George”.

Joey Tracker is a nice little app for tracking the Tufts University shuttle bus. They’re running a real time tracking system from Ublip, and receiving updates on the location of the bus via GeoRSS, and mapping that with GMaps API. Nice.

InSTEDD is an “NGO Startup” formed by Larry Brilliant in 2006, focused on building and distributing innovative technology for humanitarian response. Dr. Brilliant is now the head of Google.org, which provided seed funding for the organization. InSTEDD emerged from a year of relative quiet, releasing some simple and elegant tools. Their approach so far appears to be reuse of the best of Web 2.0 for humanitarian response.

SMS Geo-Chat builds location based chat on top of SMS, with visualization in Google Earth, and wider distribution of data with GeoRSS (hence the posting here). This is developed further in Contacts Nearby, which leverages the multi-modal communication of Twitter and the social network of Facebook.

If this sounds just a little like TwitterVision, it’s not surprising, I reckon the influence is there and that’s a very good thing; the innovation and ideas in this field are out there, and what’s really needed is a channel to get the clever hacks into the hands of responders. We’ve discussed and worked with GeoRSS for disaster response for a couple years (National Geographic had a good summary in 2006). There’s been discussions of Twitter in dsiaster response since it’s launch; SMS is the last communication channel to go down in an emergency, and the first to come back up. And Twitter is multi-modal, easily connecting SMS potentially to any other channel. These ideas had a good workout during the San Diego fires.

Just a couple critiques. The format they used to encode location in Twitter is “lat*lon*message”; rather than the nanoformats (”l:lat,lon”) used in TwitterVision and Bangladesh Boat Journey. I think nanoformats are potentially more flexible and already being used, so why invent a new format. Also, I’m not sure why they chose ASP.net to code their projects in — are most humanitarian response organizations running msft products? Or is it because some of the core team come from Microsoft? Hopefully there’s scope for full open source solutions in the future.