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The kick-off keynote is in two parts, with Chris DiBona giving the first keynote on open source idealisim and the APIs and then Ed Parsons who'll be talking about the Geoweb.


Waiting for the keynote to start...
 

Chris DiBona talking about open source and APIs
Chris kicked off talking about their sitemaps protocol for web crawling, which they've released under the Creative Commons license, and about how this approach is being extended to the rest of their APIs. He's arguing that "What's good for the web is good for Google" and how bogus it is to create your own license, and how releasing APIs is the obvious thing to do...

He's going on to talk about Google Gears, which is a new too which can be used to make web apps able to work offline, which they're releasing into the big bad world today. Looks like they've snuck it into the Newest APIs session because they were all being secretive and stuff, so I get to have a close look.

Chris has handed over to Ed Parsons, fresh in from Where 2.0, who is talking about geography, maps and building the Geoweb.


Ed Parsons talking about the Geoweb
Ed has just said "Everything that happens, happens somewhere", which is something I hear from my other half all the time. I've definitely got déjà vu here...

Ed went on to talk about the amount of geographical information and how only a small fraction of it has been indexed yet, and the huge amount of niche long-tail geo-data that is sitting around waiting for people to pick up make accessible. After his overview, he returned to the core product Google Maps and how the functionality of the application is exposed for us to use. He brought us all the way up to date and talked about street view which was only released yesterday at Where 2.0. No open API yet, but it's coming soon. He's also talking about the new Google Mapplets application.

From there he went on to talk about Google Earth as a platform, and how the database is open and extensible, and how you can use KML to create and expose content.

We're about to break for lunch, I've got pictures, but pushing that much data up to Flickr isn't going to happen with the wireless network in its current state. I'll upload them when the network improves.

Update: The session has been posted to YouTube...