Adena Schutzberg at Directions Mag All Points Blog has the news that MapQuest have introduced their own 'StreetView' service. The new service can be viewed on the main http://www.mapquest.com MapQuest website. MapQuest claim:

• 3D Imagery: 360° horizontal and 160° vertical views of any given image within 360 View on MapQuest.com.
• Side-by-side Imagery: The street map is positioned on side of the screen and 360 View on the other; this puts the location in perspective.
• Simple Navigation: Easily move to a new location by moving the green arrow on the street map.

Once it has loaded it is fairly quick but this is probably due to the relatively low resolution of the images. Coverage is currently limited. For example in the Dallas Fort Worth area, only highways and a few major roads are covered. This contrasts with Google Maps which has had coverage of individual local urban streets for a few years now.

I initially had some trouble getting it started so I think the user interface could be a little bit more intuitive. Once you have the StreetView panel up, the green arrow is easily moved - as claimed.

The BBC are reporting that the UK Government are planning to offer UK postcode data for free from April 2010.

The dataset that will probably be 'freed' is the geographic coverage data for each postcode, and not the Royal Mail PAF dataset which links individual addresses to postcodes.  Exactly how the data will be offered and under what conditions are still being decided. So, in common with the recent Ordnance Survey announcement, we should probably wait until the data is actually released before deciding how big a step forward this actually is.

Today, MetaCarta announced the release of version 4.5 of their Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP). GSRP is a geographic search platform that can also interpret and tag natural language with geo-location information.

MetaCarta are describing v4.5 as a major upgrade with enhancements to the Geographic Data Module, tagging, connector, custom gazetteer, JavaScript SDK; plus support for OpenSearch.The Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine has also been upgraded to improve the disambiguation of human names from place names. Geotagging enhancements include centers of higher education, plus improved neighborhood and partial street address tagging. The JavaScript SDK enhancements include native support for OpenLayers, Bing Maps, and Google Maps.

Further information can be found on MetaCarta's GSRP pages.