It’s a few days after the event, but it is still worth blogging:

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2076&from=rss

The bit that’s exciting:

“In a breakthrough applauded today by the international Group on Earth Observations, scientists and decision-makers will soon have unrestricted global access at no charge to the USGS Landsat archive, the world’s most extensive collection of continuously-acquired land imagery. By the end of this year, the full collection will, for the first time, be freely available online to users around the globe…”

It’s not quite the game-changer that Google Earth was, but it is some good financial news in the current climate.  We’ve been working with Landsat data for a while and this might help kick off a few projects that had limited budgets in the new year…

Speaking of interesting economic times, there was an interesting podcast on Directions Magazine about the effect of the “downturn” on GIS.  It’s here http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2942 – download it from there in your favourite format if you are interested.  It’s very American centric but it’s quite optimistic about the next year for GIS.

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