A blog about Raymond Yee's Book Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services
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I just posted the following chapters -- for your edication and entertainment:
As always, I'd be grateful for any constructive feedback: questions, comments, expressions of bewilderment. 
With pointers such as Greg Sadetsky's tidbits on how Google Map's Street View works in the browser (e.g., URLs of specific shots, a pointer to a Flare, an Actionscript decompiler), how long will we have to wait until we get mashups that give us a video tour of Berkeley using photos from Street View?
The online mapping arena is changing so quickly, and I obviously am not able to cover the details of all these changes. Nonetheless, it's helpful to speculate on what I believe to be the long-term trends in this area as a way of priming yourself for future changes.
KML has moved beyond its use in Google Earth alone. For instance, you can display KML files and export search results and one of your "my maps" from Google Maps in KML. Other applications are beginning to support KML: For instance, you can get KML coming out of Yahoo! Pipes. There is support for KML in Feed Validator KML is being shepherded through a standards process: Paul Ramsey: KML @ OGC. Google is advising people to use KML so that its geo--search can index KML -- in KML 2.2, there is an attribution element. Google apparently will also index GeoRSS.
In Chapter 13, I cover how to use some of major mapping APIs: Google Maps, Yahoo, Mapquest, and Microsofts'. It would be convenient to be able to not worry about the differences among the maps and easily switch among the various maps. That's the promise of a mapping"abstraction" library such as Mapstraction (http://mapstraction.com). We'll have to see how and whether it is widely used to gauge the library's effectiveness.
Along a different vein is OpenLayers (http://www.openlayers.org/), which is:
You can try out OpenLayers in FlashEarth. Go to the site and select OpenLayers. You might have to zoom out sufficiently to see any tiles (e.g., http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=38.417308&lon=-122.271821&z=9.9&r=0&src=ol)
Two recent entries of note: