Google Maps, Geo Tagging and Google Earth
Google Maps'8 is another example of a web service that has been adapted for social networking. It was a resource that passed into the educational community fairly quickly - again it is free with a more detailed and professional version available commercially. You can zoom into any area on the globe and overlay or tag information onto any of the maps.
An allied resource is the Geobloggers19 site.This uses the Google Maps API20 combining three website resources - the RSS feeds coming from Flickr, Google Maps, Google Earth - and other allied web technologies2'. You can take a picture of a location anywhere on the planet - look it up on Google Maps and tag the latitude and longitude into Flickr and create a link from that picture to Google Earth22, which is a highly dynamic online atlas. Having done this, you can fly in an animation to your online tagged photo onto the surface of the planet where it is located. The social interaction and rich information systems resulting from such a resource are obvious in certain curricular areas.
Open APIs
Application programming interfaces (APIs) enable users to add functionality to existing services or use the data from websites as part of other services. Many web companies are now making access to APIs freely available (open APIs).The best developments may even be incorporated into the original service for others to use.