“Where 09” is a fine conference put on by O'Reilly Publishing. At this year's conference, Jack Dangermond, honcho at ESRI, talked about “Realizing Spatial Intelligence on the GeoWeb.” Take note of how he and a colleague use a command in Google Maps – “Greeley: mapservers”  — to call up a bunch of map servers and their files for, in this case, Greeley, Colo.

That's a neat search tool that may give you quite mixed results depending on how GIS hip your local governments are.  It seems to work for many non-U.S. cities, too.  For example, “Amsterdam: mapserver” returned good results, but nothing for Mexico City or Berlin.  Still,  we think the search tool. while young, has a lot of promise, especially if you can find the time to drill down into the metadata for individual maps.

For the Dangermond presentation (15 min) go to: http://where.blip.tv/file/2151502/