There’s a great little video over at Google Maps Mania that takes us on a virtual road trip to the ends of the reaches of Street View, to the “borders, shorelines, dead ends and overlooks from New Zealand to Svalbard, from Alaska to South Africa”. Well worth a look.

The BBC has a story on London’s recent decision to install parking sensors that show available parking spots within the city, in real-time, via a smartphone app.

GIS User has a post talking about a new project that aims to automatically steer satellite imaging sensors, or UAVs, towards those areas suffering from a natural disaster – using information crowd-sourced from social media.

Speaking of UAVs and natural disasters, the CSIRO has been using UAVs to track the spread of grass fires, in an attempt to better understand the way that they grow and spread, in the hopes of better predicting their movements.

And, in international UAV news, according to Geodata Policy, the US Senate has held a hearing on ‘drones’, to examine the growth of their use, including consideration of safety and privacy issues surrounding the operation of drones in the United States.

GeoAwesomeness has a post on National Geographic’s interactive maps on rising seas, which allows users to see just how high the seas would rise if all the ice melted.

Google Maps Mania also has created a funny little map entitled ‘what the world wants’, which takes the Google/Yahoo! autocomplete result for each country’s name + ‘wants’, and then places it on a map.

And, I know I’m probably going to far with the Google Maps Mania posts this week, but, if you’re looking for a unique style for your new Google Maps project, then Google Maps Mania has your back, as it describes a service, Map Stylr, that makes creating such a style a cinch.