MSFT Virtual Earth just received a major upgrade. Being someone that doesn’t have a car or a portable nav system, I can’t really experience the export to GPS features, but one thing in this release did catch my eye. The integration of hyper-local content:

(via the Virtual Earth Blog)

Neighborhood Subscribe via GeoRSS – I’m biased as this is the feature area I work on here on the VE team, but this is one of my favorite new features. basically it gives you the ability to zoom in the map to any area of interest, then pluck an RSS feed to stay up to date on goings on in the region. the RSS feed will be populated by spatially querying our GeoWeb library as described above. What would you use this for? grab an RSS feed for your neighborhood to be kept up to date on all contributions from your neighbors. or grab a feed for a city you will be visiting soon. Grabbing a feed is simple and interactive – While in Explore mode as described in the previous section, hit the   link to get the RSS URL. You can add it to any RSS reader and each time you view it the most recent entries for the area will be displayed.

Playing with this now, more on it later…