MapForums

At the end of the day GeoRSS is nothing more than another XML markup for describing location based information. But it has one distinctive attribute that sets it part from all other ML's, location based or otherwise - It is viewable in ANY application that can understand RSS. This means that content you are publishing in GeoRSS is not only viewable on a map but it can be displayed and processed by the 100's of applications out there that already understand RSS but have no idea what a map is.

Case in point - In reviewing activity reports for Live Search Maps today I noticed that this Collection of Fire activity in California was viewed about a half million times today. On MSNBC the Collection has been viewed a few million more times in this mashup. That's a lot of people voyeuristically keeping tabs on this tragic situation. But then I noticed something more interesting - a few thousand people began subscribing to the Collection's GeoRSS feed today allowing them to view this information where they normally turn for up to the minute news be it a custom home page, dedicated RSS reader, Outlook... The author of the Collection doesn't need to do any additional work to serve their content to Map savvy users either - the same feed works in any Geo-aware RSS implementation.

A URL to a GeoRSS subscription to a Collection looks like this:

http://maps.live.com/GeoCommunity.asjx?action=retrieverss&mkt=en-us&cid=4F0BF5AFF9C0F005!101

If you already know the ID for a particular Collection just plug it into the CID parameter on that URL. If not, view it interactively at Live Search Maps and hit the RSS button to grab the URL