As the amount of personal information stored at remote service providers increases, so does the danger of data theft. When connections to remote services are made in the clear and authenticated sessions are kept using HTTP cookies, data theft becomes extremely easy to achieve. In this paper, we study the architecture of the world’s largest service provider, i.e., Google. First, with the excepti...

This eye-opener article aims at introducing the health GIS community to the emerging online consumer geoinformatics services from Google and Microsoft (MSN), and their potential utility in creating custom online interactive health maps. Using the programmable interfaces provided by Google and MSN, we created three interactive demonstrator maps of England's Strategic Health Authorities. These ca...

Once every five minutes, Twitter publishes a list of trending topics by monitoring and analyzing tweets from its users. Similarly, Google makes available hourly a list of hot queries that have been issued to the search engine. We claim that social trends fired by Twitter may help explain and predict web trends derived from Google. Indeed, we argue that information flooding nearly real-time acro...

Google Earth provides an open source, easy to access and cost free image data that support map interest community. Therefore, depending of this community on Google Earth, grows up day by day. More than simply providing locational information, Google Earth allows users to add their own content such as photos or descriptions of areas or landmarks. They can also extrapolate information from the sa...