Ok I finally made it to Google's Geo Developer.  I missed the first bit, but am enjoying the Google Maps breakout group.  I do think that Google needs some people working for them that have some GIS background.  When people are asking about the source of the data for the geocoder and nobody in the room has an answer (I am assuming that is from Navteq as they say it is from their road data).  Or when they try to suggest (not to pick on the guy, this was not his area of expertise) that KML came before GML...

UPDATE...Somebody just asked about implementing a rendering scheme for KML and the entire team gave him a blank stare.  Don't you think users would like to map graduated circles based on crime counts for example.

Oh Well....

It is good to see GIS reaching the masses.  This should be an exciting year.

The KML/Z to Google Maps sounds pretty cool.  I am looking forward to trying that.  They are also storing KML/Z on their servers.  It would be nice to be able to spatially query that information.   Not just the bounding box, but point in poly queries.   That would require a new backend to store that kml/z spatially.  No xpath queries would work on that...

More later.

Jeremy