Nestoria Blog

It seems the pace of innovation in the online geo community is showing no signs of slowing down. Yesterday O’Reilly Radar posted that Google Maps now supports GeoRSS.

For those who don’t recall, GeoRSS is a very simple way to add location information to data feeds. Here at Nestoria we’ve supplied users with GeoRSS formatted property feeds since last summer.

So what does all this mean for you, the Nestoria user? Well, no by pasting a Nestoria RSS URL into Google maps you can see the RSS feed on a map. Have a look:

Of course, you might say “Ed, if I wanted to see flats to buy on a map, I’d just use Nestoria directly.” I agree that the native Nestoria implementation is a better user experience:

Nevertheless, this is still important because it’s a good example of data exchange formats making the merging of different data sets dead simple. More and more, it’s getting easier and easier for the pieces of the internet to talk with each other, and this is just one more example. And like any good discussion, you never know where the conversation will take us. This sort of serendipitous innovation exactly why we invest time and energy in the Nestoria API

As a long time lurker on the GeoRSS mailing lists I can tell you that defining data formats is hard work. Big thanks to all the people out there working hard to get the ‘pesky details’ of the internet to work.