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.