Everything And Nothing

Wide Wide Web

GeoWeb - n., digital maps on the Web annotated with text, images, sound and videos. 

“What is happening is the creation of this extremely detailed map of the world that is being created by all the people in the world,” John V. Hanke, director of Google Maps and Google Earth, told Miguel Helft of The New York Times. “The end result is that there will be a much richer description of the earth.”

In April, Google unveiled a service called My Maps that makes it easy for users to create customized maps. Since then, users of the service have created more than four million maps of everything from where to find good cheap food in New York to summer festivals in Europe.

More than a million maps have been created with a service from Microsoft called Collections, and 40,000 with tools from Platial, a technology start-up. MotionBased, a Web site owned by Garmin, lets users upload data they record on the move with a Global Positioning System receiver. It has amassed more than 1.3 million maps of hikes, runs, mountain bike rides and other adventures, according to Helft.

On the Flickr photo-sharing service owned by Yahoo, users have “geotagged” more than 25 million pictures, providing location data that allows them to be viewed on a map or through 3-D visualization software like Google Earth.

MapQuest Enhances 'Send to Cell' Service

Mapquest has launched upgrades to its free "Send to Cell" services that allow users to create driving directions and maps on their desktops or laptops and send them to any Web-enabled cell phone.

Once directions or maps are created on a computer, users click on a Send to Cell link. The information, which is "right-sized" for cell screens, is accessed on mobile devices via a text message containing a URL link. The service is available on several major carriers at www.mapquest.com.

[ via Online Media Daily ]

Getting There

It is a testament both to the early allure of the automobile and to the difficulty of travelling very far in one that, in 1907, Andrew McNally II, the grandson of the co-founder of Rand McNally & Company, chose to spend his honeymoon in Milwaukee. He and his bride drove there, from their home town of Chicago. The way was mostly unpaved and unmarked. In those days, there were no route numbers or state roads; in Wisconsin, there were merely old cart and carriage thoroughfares, whose primary purpose was the conveyance of food from farm to market. It wasn’t yet clear how drivers would find their way around. Navigation depended, mainly, on asking people along the way where to go next—an untenable state of affairs, it would seem, as long as the drivers were men, which most of them were.

Rand McNally started out printing railway tickets and flyers, and then, in the eighteen-seventies, branched out into the business of publishing wax-engraved maps for gold prospectors and other hardy tourists. These were maps more of terrain than of roads through it. Still, Andrew McNally II had a sense that the automobile might enhance the way-finding side of the business, and so, on this honeymoon trip, he strapped a camera onto the front fender of his car and, at every junction—every right or left turn—stopped and snapped a photograph. He and his bride did the same on the return trip. Back in Chicago, McNally compiled the photographs into a booklet, with a little arrow in each photograph indicating the proper direction to take. The booklet was called a Photo-Auto Guide and was essentially a driver’s-eye view of the way to Milwaukee, at least as it looked that spring. (Obsolescence loomed; a new barn or a fallen oak could alter the appearance of the road.)

For the full story by Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker, click here.

Subway maps for your iPod

Upload the maps into the iPod's photo albums for easy access in times of underground uncertainty. The maps work on all color-screen iPods (formerly iPod Photo) and are absolutely free. New York, D.C., Boston and Hong Kong are currently available, with San Francisco, Chicago and London on the way.

Love Google Maps?

You'll really love customizing them. (via Andrew Lark)

Google's new and improved satellite maps

Google's satellite maps are about to get better...a new and improved version is on the way. (via Blogging About Incredible Blogs)