The regular reader of this blog may notice a slight change in the design. That’s due to the new design, dubbed ‘monsterism’, which debuted today. I’ve had this idea swimming around in my head since February, and thanks to a recent holiday and vacation day, I finally had time to put my ideas to pixels.

Feed subscribers should be none the wiser, but you might want to drop by the site to keep yourself in the know.

I know there’s a bug or two to work on, but let me know if you see anything really odd.

Now back to my regular intermittent blogging schedule.

More notes from day 1 of Where 2.0 – the day’s over and there’s a lot to take in.

The other big Google announcement was Google Mapplets. The best way to describe Mapplets is to use Google’s words: “mashup of mashups”. Meaning you can take a services built on Google Maps (choose from 1000’s) and combine them for (what’s likely to be) some really interesting results. There’s more in-depth detail over at the Google Lat Long Blog.

Garmin (my travel companions) announced our developer site with a focus on Garmin Communicator – a browser plugin that allows websites like Geocaching.com and MotionBased to send and receive GPS data to Garmin devices. Web Services is another tool that opens up the power of MotionBased’s data and tools. Last but not least, Web Drop is (I think) a little hidden gem that allows you to highlight any address on the web, geocode it and send it to a Garmin device with a single click.

That’s all I’m writing for today; I need to cull through my notes before I write about all the other stuff that was announced or discussed today.

The first hour of where has been interesting; Google announced today’s launch of StreetView: see it in action. During the presentation, John Hanke from Google ran through a couple of really remarkable examples of the power of Street View, including finding parking in San Fran. He zoomed in on the parking lot, zoomed in on the sign at the the entrance to the parking lot and was close enough to read that the parking lot was open to the public… there’s incredible potential here.

GeoRSS was mentioned in every presentation. Tagging has been a big topic, particularly how to open up tagging users and maintain clean, usable data.

The break’s ending… more news, thoughts, and notes to come.