JPG magazine is going out of business. An experiment in crowdsourcing, and the home of some excellent photos, the magazine and Web site are finished as of Monday, Jan. 5.

Google is soliciting contributions to Google Maps with their Map Maker service.

With Google Map Maker, you can become a citizen cartographer and help improve the quality of maps and local information in your region. You are invited to map the world with us!

They've posted several videos to YouTube that show timelapsed edits to maps; here's Islamabad, Pakistan coming into existence.

After a two-year rush program by the Pentagon's research arm, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, troops are now getting what might be described as Google Maps for the Iraq counterinsurgency. There is nothing cutting-edge about the underlying technology: software that runs on PCs and taps multiple distributed databases. But the trove of information the system delivers is of central importance in the daily lives of soldiers.

The new technology--called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR--is a map-centric application that junior officers (the young sergeants and lieutenants who command patrols) can study before going on patrol and add to upon returning. By clicking on icons and lists, they can see the locations of key buildings, like mosques, schools, and hospitals, and retrieve information such as location data on past attacks, geotagged photos of houses and other buildings (taken with cameras equipped with Global Positioning System technology), and photos of suspected insurgents and neighborhood leaders. They can even listen to civilian interviews and watch videos of past maneuvers. It is just the kind of information that soldiers need to learn about Iraq and its perils.

Great to know the war on terror will now be fought with technology from years ago.

If you're reading this, then chances are you already know about Web 2.0. Even if you don't know the term itself, you're one of millions worldwide who are actively creating, sharing or benefiting from user-generated content that characterizes Web 2.0 phenomena.

As a communicator, I want to expand the reach of the Library and access to our magnificent collections as far and wide as possible. Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, so many staff in Library offices and so many dollars in the budget. Priorities have to be chosen that will most effectively advance our mission.

That's why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator.

The CMU research team is involved in digitising old books and manuscripts supplied by a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive, and uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to examine scanned images of texts and turn them into digital text files which can be stored and searched by computers.

But the OCR software is unable to read about one in 10 words, due to the poor quality of the original documents.

The only reliable way to decode them is for a human to examine them individually - a mammoth task since CMU processes thousands of pages of text every month.

To solve this problem the team takes images of the words which the OCR software can't read, and uses them as CAPTCHAs.

These CAPTCHAs, known as reCAPTCHAS, are then distributed to websites around the world to be used in place of conventional CAPTCHAs.

When visitors decipher the reCAPTCHAs to gain access to the web site, the answers - the results of humans examining the images - are sent back to CMU.

Every time an Internet user deciphers a reCAPTCHA, another word from an old book or manuscript is digitised.

To ensure that the reCAPTCHAs are deciphered correctly, website visitors are actually presented with images of two words to examine, the contents of one of which is already known.

Oddly, I knew nothing about this until reading about it at the BBC. Apparently, there's even a reCAPTCHA Drupal module that I can use. Nifty.