The Map Room: Online Maps

Online Maps

This category includes the following subcategories, whose entries are not included below: Hacks & Mashups (171 entries).

Mapping Tehran: Google has made available recent satellite imagery of Tehran from the IKONOS satellite via a Google Earth layer. How recent? Last Thursday. It would have been higher resolution if it had come from the GeoEye-1 satellite, but weather apparently played a factor there. Brady Forrest compares the maps of Tehran… Read more →; Posted on Monday, June 22, 2009 at 8:44 PM
Categories: Current Events, Google Earth, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Goes to Ottawa: Google’s Canadian managing director was summoned before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics yesterday, where he was grilled by Ottawa MP Pierre Poilievre (whom we’ve heard about before) about the privacy implications of Street View, the National Post reports. Note that Street View… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 8:18 PM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Yahoo Upgrades European Map Sites: Yahoo announces upgrades to the British and French editions of Yahoo Maps; the German version will get them in a few weeks. These have already been implemented on the U.S. edition, haven’t they? Previously: Yahoo’s “Classic Maps” Discontinued; Yahoo Maps Upgrades; Google, Yahoo Maps Refreshed…. Read more →; Posted on Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 9:26 AM
Categories: Online Maps
How to Report Map Errors: GPS Review explains how to correct an error in a map provided by GPS unit or online mapping service — a process greatly simplified by the fact that, at least in North America, there are essentially only two mapping providers (Navteq and Tele Atlas), which you contact directly. It’s easy… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 12:11 PM
Categories: Mapping Errors, Online Maps
Google Adding Trails to Street View: Google is taking Street View to biking and hiking trails, USA Today reports. Instead of a car with a camera mounted on the roof, Google employees are using “a modified three-wheeled bike, like the ones used to take tourists for a spin, with a huge antenna and camera on back.”… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 7:29 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Topo Maps & Trails
Bing: Microsoft has renamed its map service again; it’s now called Bing Maps (the bing.com URL isn’t resolving in my browser right now; I may have to check back later). Interesting that “Virtual Earth” was what they called their enterprise mapping platform and “Live Search Maps” was what they called their… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:13 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google to Reshoot Street View Imagery in Japan: A little lower, please. Despite having taken photos in 12 Japanese cities already, Google has agreed to reshoot its Japanese Street View imagery from a slightly lower vantage point — 16 inches (400 mm) lower, to be exact — to avoid looking over too many fences. Via Mapperz…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 6:58 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Greece Halts Street View Image Collection: Greece’s data protection agency has asked Google to stop collecting images for Street View on its streets and to provide details on how long it keeps images and how it informs those whose photographs are being taken of their rights (Brietbart, CNet). Via Slashgeo…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 8:45 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Ottawa Citizen Freaks Out About Street View: Google’s Street View cars are combing the streets of Ottawa; this rather unbalanced piece by Robert Sibley in today’s Ottawa Citizen comes across as a jeremiad about the state of privacy in modern life without actually stopping to question whether the view from a public street is, in any reasonable… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 6:12 PM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Street View, Privacy and Liberty: The Grauniad’s Michael Cross on the ruling by the Information Commissioner’s Office that Street View does not contravene the Data Protection Act (see previous entry): The ICO’s statement says there is no law against taking pictures of people in the street as long as the photographer is not harassing people…. Read more →; Posted on Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 10:12 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps

Google Street View Privacy Update: Canada, Sweden and the UK: The UK’s Information Commissioner has ruled that the risk of privacy invasion by Google Street View is not enough to warrant removing the service, calling such a move “disproportionate.” Stefan compares the British reaction to how he expects Swedes to react to the service (Google’s cars have been spotted in… Read more →; Posted on Friday, April 24, 2009 at 1:30 PM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Will Yahoo Outsource Its Maps?: Buried in the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of job cuts at Yahoo is the suggestion that Yahoo may farm out its maps to another company, which is generating a certain amount of reaction in the map blogosphere: All Points Blog, GeoWebGuru. Here’s the actual quote from the story: “Yahoo Maps… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 9:07 PM
Categories: Industry News, Online Maps
Tyler Bell on Yahoo’s Open Location Program: As a preview of his talk at next month’s Where 2.0 conference, Yahoo’s Geo Technologies lead Tyler Bell sits down for a long interview with O’Reilly Media’s James Turner, in which they discuss Yahoo’s behind-the-scenes geo technologies (e.g., geotagging on Flickr, Fire Eagle, GeoPlanet) before turning to the topic of… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 9:51 AM
Categories: Geolocation Services, Industry News, Online Maps
Another Report Has Google Beating MapQuest: Google Maps surpassed MapQuest over the weekend in terms of monthly visitors according to Hitwise numbers; a couple of other reports had Google beating MapQuest back in January. I guess it depends on the methodology. Via All Points Blog. Previously: Report: Google Surpassed MapQuest in January; Market Share Update. Update:… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 8:59 AM
Categories: Industry News, Online Maps
Errors in Google’s Maps of Toronto: The Toronto Star’s Map of the Week blog discovers several errors in Google Maps’ coverage of Toronto. You may recall that I noticed a bunch of errors in my neck of the woods back in September. The blog entry is soliciting error reports in the comments; “We’ll gather the responses… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, April 12, 2009 at 7:13 PM
Categories: Mapping Errors, Online Maps, Toronto
Imagine Street View in 50 Years: “Street View might be pretty amazing now but it’s only going to get more amazing. Even if the technology stays exactly the same — which it won’t, it will only get better — Google Street View will become increasingly gob-smacking as the decades pass,” says Phil Gyford. “Imagine in, say,… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at 6:53 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Village Mob Blocks Street View Car: Google has faced a lot of criticism for its Street View service, but this past Wednesday was the first time, I think, that they faced an angry mob when one of its cars tried to photograph streets in Broughton, a village in Buckinghamshire, England: BBC News, Times. No word on… Read more →; Posted on Friday, April 3, 2009 at 7:03 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Google Street View Meets Canadian Privacy Laws: Google Street View isn’t even available for Canadian locations yet, but already Google is running afoul of Canada’s strict privacy legislation. The Ottawa Citizen’s Vito Pilieci has a couple of stories about Google Street View in Canada: this one on the presence of Google’s camera vehicles on Canadian streets, and… Read more →; Posted on Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:51 PM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Street View in the UK and the Netherlands: Reported everywhere: Google’s Street View adds 25 cities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands; here’s a brief Grauniad article…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 1:34 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Tyler Bell Interview: It’s an interview packed with softball questions, but Telematics Update’s interview with Dr. Tyler Bell, who heads the Yahoo Geo Technologies product team, reveals where Yahoo sees itself relative to other mapping providers. Short version: not as an also-ran by any stretch. Tyler spends time talking about Yahoo’s GeoPlanet service,… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 9:56 AM
Categories: Industry News, Online Maps
Neocartography Panel at SXSW: Sunday morning at SXSW Interactive, there was a panel entitled Neocartography: Mapping Design and Usability Evolved: “Designers are dropping maps into their applications with little concern for usability or design and users are getting ‘Google Map fatigue.’ We need to move beyond the simple pin-dropping and consider appropriate mapping interfaces…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 9:33 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo’s ‘Classic Maps’ Discontinued: The “new” version of Yahoo Maps was released as a beta in November 2005 and became the default version a year later, at which point the old version remained for dialup users. It’s taken until now — more than two years later — for Yahoo to discontinue the “classic maps”… Read more →; Posted on Friday, March 13, 2009 at 7:25 AM
Categories: Online Maps
New Yahoo CEO Uses Google Maps: I’m not sure how someone working on Yahoo Maps is going to react to a headline like this: Yahoo CEO likes Google Maps better than Yahoo Maps. Key graf: After admitting that she uses Google Maps, [new Yahoo CEO Carol] Bartz said Yahoo Maps isn’t as good as it should… Read more →; 1
Posted on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 7:07 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo Maps Upgrades: No new data, but Yahoo announced some upgrades to Yahoo Maps’s interface and international support (languages, kilometres-vs.-miles) yesterday…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 9:01 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Report: Google Surpassed MapQuest in January: Edward has a couple of additional data points to add to the Google vs. MapQuest market share question; in addition to the four-point gap Hitwise reported, comScore apparently says that Google beat MapQuest in January; Compete.com reports something similar. Edward also points to this rant by former AOL executive John… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 7:47 PM
Categories: Industry News, Online Maps
Market Share Update: Hitwise reports that MapQuest continues to hold a small lead over Google Maps, even though it looked like Google would soon overtake it a few months ago. Still, compared to last year, when MapQuest held a 50-to-22 lead over Google, a four-point gap is not much to crow about. It’s… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 6:51 PM
Categories: Industry News, Online Maps
Virtual Earth Imagery Update and Other News: January’s Virtual Earth imagery update includes a total 37 terabytes of data, Microsoft’s first use of Digital Globe satellite imagery, and, among other things, bird’s-eye imagery for Paris and other French cities (see also, naturally, GeoInWeb. In other Microsoft mapping news, Live Maps India has been updated, and Microsoft… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 7:09 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Paris, Satellite & Aerial
Windows Mobile Devices Get Bird’s-Eye View: Mapperz notes that Virtual Earth’s bird’s-eye view is now available on Windows Mobile 6 devices; this is apparently the URL (I can’t tell; I don’t have a compatible device)…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 9:25 PM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
Google Maps Transit Layer: Google has announced a transit layer for Google Maps. Stations have been visible before; this layer adds the lines. It’s available for a total of 58 cities so far; I imagine Londoners used to the Beck diagram will have their heads explode when confronted with a geographically correct Tube… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 3:09 PM
Categories: Mass Transit, Online Maps
Google vs. MapQuest: Search Results Boosting Map Traffic?: Google Maps’s traffic is rapidly closing in on MapQuest, and a MapQuest executive is alleging that it’s because Google Maps gets favourable placements from Google search results, Investor’s Business Daily reports. Search engines send their users to their own mapping services, which is problematic for MapQuest — not a lot… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, December 25, 2008 at 10:29 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Online Map Updates: Google Earth Imagery, Yahoo International Coverage: Another Google Earth imagery update; details at Google Earth Blog and/or Google LatLong. Yahoo’s expanded its international map coverage. “We’ve added detailed coverage to 45 new countries, with new data in a further 30 countries,” says the Yahoo Geo Techonologies Blog…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 6:35 PM
Categories: Google Earth, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
A Google Street View Roundup: It’s been a busy month for Google’s Street View, what with new imagery coming to New Zealand, expanded imagery in Australia, a doubling of U.S. coverage, and its availability on Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile (iPhone was last month). Meanwhile, a Street View prank…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 6:09 PM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
Nokia Maps 3.0 Beta: I’m late in reporting this, so you probably already know that early this month Nokia announced a beta of version 3.0 of its Nokia Maps software. New features include pedestrian directions and terrain relief maps. Nokia’s maps are also available on the Web through its Ovi platform; the site… Read more →; Posted on Monday, December 15, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
The Year in Google Maps: On Google Maps Mania, Keir Clarke summarizes the year in Google Maps. (Oddly enough, more things have already occcurred since then.)… Read more →; Posted on Monday, December 15, 2008 at 9:18 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Map Blog Update: Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search is self-explanatory. Renalid is dead; Renaud Euvrard is now collaborating with Audrey Malherbe at their new blog, GeoInWeb (en français, bien sûr). GIS Pathway is a site — it has an RSS feed and is powered by WordPress, so I’m calling it… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 8:59 PM
Categories: Blogs, GIS, Online Maps
MapQuest: ‘Out of Hibernation’ or Muddling Through?: I’ve been seeing more than a few stories lately about some incremental improvements MapQuest has announced to its service, which befuddles those who think that the venerable mapping service isn’t doing nearly enough in response to its upstart competition (i.e., Google, but of course that includes Microsoft and Yahoo who… Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 at 6:25 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Online Maps Share Same Zoom Levels: David Janes: “Did you know that Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Virtual Earth all use the same map tile resolutions? That is, you can actually seamlessly switch between mapping systems and have everything line up exactly the same way.” Examples provided. Google has one wider zoom than the others; Yahoo… Read more →; Posted on Monday, December 1, 2008 at 10:00 AM
Categories: Online Maps
The Growth of OpenStreetMap: This post on the UK edition of TechCrunch about OpenStreetMap, written by Ed Freyfogle, provides a pretty good overview of what it’s been up to and where it stands vis-à-vis other mapping providers. Here’s an interesting excerpt: “As the biggest commercial geodata providers Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ have been acquired,… Read more →; Posted on Monday, December 1, 2008 at 8:25 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps Updates: iPhone 2.2, Korea and, um, Pegman: Google Maps has now come to South Korea, but only from the Korean version of Google Maps (compare this view of Seoul with this one). This is apparently due to Korean export restrictions on mapping data. Via Google Maps Mania. Meanwhile, the controls for Google Maps have been redesigned: they’re… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 7:31 PM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
Argentina Appears in Google Maps: Finally! Argentina gets roads and streets — and municipalities — in Google Maps. It was one of the larger remaining countries without significant coverage. Bolivia, Paraguay and the Guianas still look pretty empty…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, November 17, 2008 at 6:07 PM
Categories: Online Maps
NYCityMap: The New York Times’s Verlyn Klinkenborg takes a look at the City of New York’s mapping portal, NYCityMap: At first, NYCityMap feels a little clunky, especially if you’re used to navigating in Google Maps. But what’s interesting are its hidden dimensions. With a few clicks, you can pull up an… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 4:44 PM
Categories: New York, Online Maps
Montréal Gets Google Transit: Montréal now has transit trip planning in Google Maps. A good thing: Montréal is an awful place to drive, but its Metro is wonderful; it’s one of the few North American cities where it’s relatively easy to go car-free. Ottawa seems to have had it for a while as well;… Read more →; Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 8:32 AM
Categories: Cities, Mass Transit, Online Maps
Google Switches to Tele Atlas, Errors Proliferate: As was widely reported, Google Maps is now exclusively using Tele Atlas as its digital mapping data provider, dropping Navteq, which provided data for Google Maps proper but not for the Mobile or API products (All Points Blog, James Fee, Mike Blumenthal, Google Maps Mania). This is presumably the result… Read more →; 3
Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 7:50 PM
Categories: Mapping Errors, Online Maps
OpenStreetMap’s Progress: If you’d like to see how OpenStreetMap has grown over the years, check out Geofabrik’s gallery of animated maps, which show OSM’s progress in a few locations. Via OpenGeoData…. Read more →; Posted on Sunday, September 21, 2008 at 6:57 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps Updates: Georgia, Israel: Google also says that new data has been added for Georgian and other countries — but which other countries, they’re not saying. (Argentina is still blank, I see.) For Georgia, it’s limited city and town labels. (Update: here’s a list of the countries; it’s mostly island nations.) Israel, however, has… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 7:28 AM
Categories: Online Maps
MapQuest Beta Plays Catchup: The most notable thing about MapQuest’s new beta version is that there’s a map on the home page. That should give you an idea of how far down the field MapQuest’s competitors have taken things, and how far behind MapQuest has gotten: the default version still has just address and… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 4:26 PM
Categories: Online Maps
A Small Country Far Away of Which We Know Little: Google is denying reports that detailed maps for Georgia and the other countries of the Caucasus on Google Maps disappeared as a result of the conflict between Georgia and Russia. The data was never there in the first place; they were simply three of several countries for which detailed maps… Read more →; 1
Posted on Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 12:43 PM
Categories: Current Events, Online Maps
Concerns About Planned British Crime Maps: Concerns are being expressed that the British Home Office’s recently announced plan to provide online crime maps for every neighbourhood in England and Wales would have a detrimental impact on housing prices and school enrolment in neighbourhoods with high crime rates; see articles in the Times and the Daily Mail… Read more →; Posted on Friday, August 8, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google, Yahoo Maps Refreshed: Both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps got refreshed last week: Google’s interface was rejigged to reduce clutter (oddly, I get the old interface when I load maps.google.com, but the new interface when I load maps.google.ca — localization bug?); Yahoo’s interface changes are less obvious but more substantive, and focus on… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, August 5, 2008 at 9:22 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps
More on Walking Directions: Richard sends along an AP story (on CNN) about online maps for walkers and bikers — it seems that high gas prices are putting people in the mind to think about other forms of transportation, and are noticing that most of our maps and directions are assuming that they will… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 9:38 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Walking Directions: Google has announced walking directions for its online maps: the directions allow you to go the wrong way down one-way streets and appear for distances less than 10 kilometres. Since it’s Google, it’s in beta; there are some interesting hurdles still to be overcome: “[W]e don’t always know if a… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 4:40 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Virtual Earth Imagery Updates: Speaking of which, the Virtual Earth evangelist blog also reports on 14.3 terabytes of new imagery for Virtual Earth…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 4:34 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps: Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps, a compilation of locations whose aerial imagery has been obscured in Google Earth and Maps. Categories range from government and military facilities to power generation sites; the list includes instances of pushback against Street View as well. Thanks… Read more →; Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008 at 10:23 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Google Earth, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
More Google News: Banned in Minnesota; New Developer Blog: Two more recent Google-related items: North Oaks, a rather xenophobic town in Minnesota — the streets are privately owned — has asked Google to remove it from Street View; Google has complied with the town’s request. Google’s gotten into trouble for its cameras trespassing on private property; the twist here… Read more →; Posted on Monday, June 2, 2008 at 4:06 PM
Categories: Blogs, Censorship, Security & Privacy, Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Yahoo Maps Traffic Update: Yahoo announces upgraded real-time traffic coverage: more cities, more detail, more roads…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 8:07 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Traffic Conditions
Longest Drives in Google Maps: Alan Taylor: “I set out to find the longest distance for which Google Maps would give Driving Directions. Now that they’ve shut down the fun ‘swim the Atlantic’ feature, things have changed a bit. It turns out there are multiple ‘longest drives,’ because the Google Maps World is partitioned (many… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 6:47 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps
Errors in Online Maps: Top Causes Of Errors In Online Mapping Systems: “Causes of internet map errors range from digital mapping methodology, data errors, data interpretation errors, usability errors, and errors in interpreting user queries.” Detailed. Via Slashgeo…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 6:56 AM
Categories: Mapping Errors, Online Maps
Yahoo Updates Imagery: I will have something on the Microsoft Live Maps/Virtual Earth update presently (once I go through all the material, and there’s a lot to go through). In the meantime, though, Yahoo Maps hasn’t been idle either, with a huge imagery update: “Going wide, we’ve made big improvements in our wall-to-wall… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 5:20 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Where’s the Water?: Chad follows up on his previous post about Google’s contour lines (previous entry) with one that notes one important shortcoming of online maps: almost none of them show where the water is. To be sure, major rivers and lakes are shown, but not smaller bodies. He concludes that “online maps… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 6:52 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Contour Lines and Other Stories: A Google Roundup: Contour lines have been added to Google Maps’s terrain map layer, which adds its their usefulness (especially, for example, in a mountain context). But it has some way to go before it’s a suitable replacement for a topo map; Chad notes that a lot of other details are not… Read more →; Posted on Friday, April 4, 2008 at 9:31 AM
Categories: Blogs, Google Earth, Hacks & Mashups, Mass Transit, Online Maps, Topo Maps & Trails
April Fool’s and Online Maps: Roundups of April Foolery related to Google Maps and Google Earth are available at Google Earth Blog and Google Maps Mania. X-ray and thermal imagery, copyrighted landscapes, and smiley faces abound. And how is this not an April Fool’s joke? Are people not paying attention?… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, April 1, 2008 at 6:30 PM
Categories: Fun, Online Maps
An Update: Garmin, MapQuest and Google: MapQuest’s announcement about partnering with Garmin jumped the gun somewhat; Garmin’s announcement says that the send-to-GPS feature is available with Google Maps as of today, but MapQuest only as of April 15. Announced earlier than Google, but available later. Rich notes: “The Google Maps feature, available as of today, allows… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, April 1, 2008 at 6:24 PM
Categories: GPS, Online Maps
Garmin and MapQuest: Send to GPS: Garmin and MapQuest are up to something. The MapQuest blog says that, “coming in April, we’ll be adding a simple drop-down link to our search results pages that allow you to download destinations or itineraries to your Garmin GPS device, and take them with you on the road.” Syncing desktop… Read more →; Posted on Monday, March 31, 2008 at 8:09 PM
Categories: GPS, Online Maps
MapQuest Traffic: MapQuest has added current traffic conditions for more than 100 metropolitan areas; more details and a list of the cities covered are available here. Digital Earth Blog has an early review: “A quick glance seems to show that they have more cities than Google, but not by a wide… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 9:23 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Traffic Conditions
Google Maps Street View and Privacy, Redux: An article in the San Antonio Express-News about the privacy implications of Google Maps Street View — there was a flurry of media coverage about this last year, so they’re definitely playing catchup — and the means available to get yourself removed from the street-level imagery. The article asks whether… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 12:35 PM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Market Share: In January, Hitwise reported on the relative market shares of the online map sites. MapQuest continued to lead with more than 50 percent of the market, with Google Maps second at 22 percent, and Yahoo and Microsoft trailing. But, Hitwise says, Google is making gains, and MapQuest is declining:… Read more →; Posted on Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 10:45 AM
Categories: GPS, Industry News, Online Maps
Google Sky on the Web: I suppose a web-based standalone version of Google Sky was inevitable, once the Google Maps API supported it, and now it’s here. Highlights include infrared, microwave and historical-map layers with opacity controls and a series of image collections from space telescopes linked from the bottom. (I should note, as… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 9:10 PM
Categories: Astronomy, Online Maps
Bizarre Sights in Google Street View: The Times has the 10 most bizarre sights in Google Street View; Valleywag has the pictures…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, March 10, 2008 at 8:56 PM
Categories: Fun, Online Maps
Yahoo Maps Updated: New updates and upgrades to Yahoo Maps include neighbourhood data, improved international coverage, and optimized map tiles (smaller files, less time to load). Update, March 17: Richard discovers that, at least in Ottawa, “the neighbourhoods are, as far as I can tell, made up.”… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 8:16 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo Adds Draggable Driving Directions: Yahoo follows Google’s lead, adding user-adjustable driving directions with a click-and-drag interface. Now that I’ve this feature for a while, I now consider it essential, especially when you have some sense of what the best route will be for at least part of the trip. Previously: Google Maps: Draggable Driving… Read more →; Posted on Saturday, December 22, 2007 at 9:10 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps
Google Maps Adds Terrain Layer: Relief maps have finally come — natively, that is — to Google Maps with the release of its “Terrain” layer (the Hybrid layer moves to a checkbox on the Satellite layer, hiding or revealing street data). As is often the case with Google, they aren’t the first — Ask.com, Virtual… Read more →; 2
Posted on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at 6:25 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Flickr Places: Flickr Places organizes geotagged photos into location-based pages — even my little town gets its own page. Meanwhile, Flickr’s map goes from pushpins to tags, which may necessarily not be an improvement. Announcements: Flickr Blog, Yahoo Local and Maps Blog. Previously: Flickr Feeds…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 7:41 PM
Categories: Geotagging, Online Maps
MapQuest Beta and Blog: MapQuest — still the ostensible market leader in online mapping, apparently — has taken some steps to catch up with its upstart rivals. Its new blog — yes, MapQuest now has a blog — begins with a post announcing MapQuest’s new beta version. The beta’s upgrades are to MapQuest’s… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, October 14, 2007 at 8:56 PM
Categories: Blogs, Online Maps
Google Updates: Imagery and Transit: A couple of quick updates about Google’s mapping stuff — quick updates seem to be all I have time or energy for at the moment, what with the full-time contract and the resulting lengthy commute. Google Transit’s features have been integrated into the main Google Maps site. And yesterday there… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, October 3, 2007 at 7:43 PM
Categories: Google Earth, Mass Transit, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps: 54 Countries Added, How Many Left?: With detailed map data being added to more and more countries all the time in Google Maps — 54 countries were added last Thursday — the holdout countries are beginning to stick out. Now that much of Latin America and Asia is online, for example, Argentina and Israel are conspicuous… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 8:23 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Street View: City Updates and Its 1907 Equivalent: Four more cities in Google Maps Street View: Houston, Orlando, Los Angeles and San Diego. Cute: Google Maps Street View Circa 1907 — or, rather, a sample of Rand McNally’s photo auto-maps, which apparently predated road maps…. Read more →; Posted on Sunday, August 19, 2007 at 5:31 PM
Categories: Cities, Houston, Los Angeles, Online Maps, Roads
Color Your Map: From what I read about it on Free Geography Tools and GPS Tracklog, Zonum Solutions’ online tool, Color Your Map, seems like a quick way of throwing together a basic choropleth map or even a range map, especially if, as Rich did, you compile county-by-county maps from various states. The… Read more →; Posted on Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:26 PM
Categories: Online Maps
GeoRSS in World Wind, KML in Virtual Earth: Work is under way to add GeoRSS support to World Wind (via Chad). Meanwhile, Peter reports that in a fall update, KML support will come to Microsoft Virtual Earth (or whatever they will be calling it by then)…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, July 30, 2007 at 7:32 PM
Categories: Online Maps, World Wind
On the iPhone and Its Lack of GPS: To read some of the commentary about the iPhone’s implementation of Google Maps, you’d think that a mobile mapping application is worthless without GPS. But is it? All Points Blog’s Joe Francica doesn’t say so outright, but in this dismissive post, he argues that Apple missed the mark by not… Read more →; 1
Posted on Wednesday, July 11, 2007 at 10:17 AM
Categories: GPS, Mobile Devices, Online Maps
A Map Blog Update: GeoWeb, Cartographismes and More: The GeoWeb 2007 conference, which takes place later this month and deals with “the convergence of Web technologies, XML, Web services, and GIS,” has a conference blog. The blog associated with Krygier and Wood’s excellent book, Making Maps (reviewed here), has moved to a new address. Other new blogs: Cartographismes,… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, July 8, 2007 at 8:03 PM
Categories: Art, Blogs, Conferences, GIS, Online Maps
Google Maps Russia: A Russian version of Google Maps was launched yesterday. Major cities — like Moscow, obviously — get building outlines and subway stations: the full, mature Google map treatment. Other cities — I tried Ufa, a city of one million in the Urals — only have major highways. The Moscow… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, July 6, 2007 at 4:06 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Shaded Relief in Virtual Earth, Google Maps: A nice touch. In its most recent update, Microsoft Virtual Earth added shaded relief to its road maps. This is something Google Maps lacks, but Google Karten notes that the map tiles from the Shaded Relief world map (see previous entry) can be added as a layer in your mashup;… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, July 5, 2007 at 4:24 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
A Google Maps Roundup: About a month’s worth of links related to Google Maps from my increasingly preposterous queue. Because the news wasn’t all about Street View. The imagery update announced in early June for Google Earth was applied to Google Maps only a week later. More cities have transit data. Expanded coverage of… Read more →; Posted on Monday, July 2, 2007 at 9:18 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Wired’s July Issue: Google Maps and the Hyperlocal Future: Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World, from Wired’s July issue, is a far-reaching state-of-the-topic article that looks at Google’s mapmaking ventures and the tremendous amount of amateur mapmaking it’s stimulated. Covers all the bases. Noteworthy: “Today, the number of mashed-up Google Maps exceeds 50,000. (Google Maps… Read more →; Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 at 1:30 PM
Categories: Google Earth, Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Google Maps: Draggable Driving Directions: The driving directions feature on Google Maps has just received a major upgrade. Multiple stops and traffic conditions have (apparently) been added, but the big one is that you can now change the route you’re given to your destination by clicking and dragging it to a new highway. (Essentially,… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 7:10 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps, Video
Miami Herald NAVTEQ Profile: It’s been a while since I’ve seen a newspaper article profiling one or the other mapping data company — i.e., NAVTEQ and/or Tele Atlas — with a focus on its local surveying efforts, but here’s a new one from the Miami Herald, which looks at NAVTEQ. (I can only imagine… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 5:16 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Surveying
Google Street View Privacy Roundup: A roundup of links about Google Street View and its privacy implications (mostly) that have been accumulating in my queue for the past few weeks. Slate: Google Spies on America. This Denver Post editorial also raises some concerns about “personal security.” (The editorial also says that “Amazon.com abandoned its photographic… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 10:00 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Google Maps Street View: Moral Panic Update: Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin asks, “Would we feel differently about street-level image mapping if it were done by a government agency? … Cameras aren’t new, maps aren’t new, the internet isn’t new, nor is Google or Microsoft. So why does this feel so freshly creepy to so many?” Xeni also… Read more →; Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 8:30 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
NY Times on Street View and Privacy: The story of the privacy implications of Google’s Street View (see previous entry) has now been picked up by the New York Times. Meanwhile, scouring Street View for interesting or amusing images is turning into another pastime, as it was when Google Earth was first released: Wired’s Threat Level, Streetviewr…. Read more →; Posted on Friday, June 1, 2007 at 11:22 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Miscellaneous Google Things: Mashup makers take note: the Google Maps API now supports driving directions. Google has gone and bought photo-geotagging site Panoramio. At a Developer Day talk, Google’s plans for integrating AdSense into its map products. (Disclaimer: I make money from AdSense.) Have a look at the car that takes most of… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 8:43 PM
Categories: Geotagging, Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Google Maps Street View and Privacy: When you consider the privacy concerns — freakouts, really — that were raised when the online map sites made satellite and aerial imagery readily available, it’s not surprising that there would be similar concerns raised about the street-level imagery announced by Google yesterday. I am surprised, though, that it took… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 at 8:18 PM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps
Being First vs. ‘Cleaner and More Thoughtful’: Valleywag on the competition between Google and Microsoft on the mapping front, touching on yesterday’s Street View announcement: “The battle for mapping supremacy continues with the rush to add new features. Unfortunately for Microsoft, being first has not been a valued differentiator. In most cases, Google’s implementation is cleaner and… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 at 7:13 AM
Categories: Online Maps
On the User-Unfriendliness of Pushpin Clusters: Daniel Jalkut has a couple of suggestions about the user-unfriendliness of tightly clustered pushpins on Google Maps: “[T]o find out what’s actually at the cluster point, I have to go back to the ugly list and click items to see where they pop up in the map. With all that… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 9:33 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Another Microsoft Imagery Update: Probably not fortuitous that Microsoft’s monthly Virtual Earth imagery update (see previous entry) also took place today: the Virtual Earth/Live Maps blog has the details; I note with interest that Ottawa, the closest city to me, is among the cities receiving 3D building coverage. Not that I can see any… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 6:44 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Street View: The big news so far from Where 2.0 is the announcement of Google’s street-level imagery for five U.S. cities — Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and (of course) San Francisco — which, in a fit of originality, they’re calling Street View: Google Earth Blog, Google Lat Long, O’Reilly… Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 4:28 PM
Categories: Cities, Las Vegas, New York, Online Maps, Roads, San Francisco, Video
Some Google Maps Updates: Google Transit adds Reno and San Diego; I must have missed when they added the Japanese rail networks, domestic airlines and ferries. Google Maps for mobile supports GPS on certain devices — for example, the BlackBerry 8800 and some Windows Mobile gadgets. Not a new feature (MapQuest had it first),… Read more →; Posted on Monday, May 28, 2007 at 8:42 AM
Categories: Driving Directions, GPS, Mass Transit, Mobile Devices, Online Maps
A Year or More for Corrections and Updates: Don’t expect instant results when you submit errors to a mapping data provider. A dentist whose office is not on the map discovers that NAVTEQ can take as much as a year, if not more, to process corrections or new material. They say they get 80,000 requests a day. I… Read more →; Posted on Friday, May 25, 2007 at 10:19 AM
Categories: Mapping Errors, Online Maps
O’Reilly Radar: Trends of Online Mapping Portals: In Trends of Online Mapping Portals, O’Reilly Radar’s Brady Forrest writes, “Last week there were several announcements made that show the direction of the online mapping portals. Satellite images and slippy maps are no longer differentiators for attracting users […] Some of these new differentiators are immersive experiences, owning the… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at 8:38 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Behind Yahoo’s New Map Design: Cartifact was involved in Yahoo’s new map design, which was launched last week. From the press release: “Cartifact contributed features not found in other online maps. At higher zoom levels, shaded relief conveys a sense of terrain and elevation, while land-cover/vegetation coloring gives a feeling of the natural environment…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, May 21, 2007 at 11:07 AM
Categories: Online Maps
MacArthur Maze vs. U.S. Route 90: Some more material about updating road data after disasters that I missed the first time around (and am only getting to now). Via Mapping Hacks, a San Francisco Chronicle article that discussed updating driving directions in the wake of the MacArthur Maze, but that also looked at the big… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 5:03 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Hurricanes 2005, Online Maps, Roads, San Francisco
Yahoo Moves to New Map Platform: Yahoo moved its maps to a new platform today, IDG News Service reports: “[W]ith the new platform, developed in-house, Yahoo Maps will perform better, offer more precise results and make backend upgrades easier to implement, Yahoo said. … The new platform will not disrupt the mapping service’s existing APIs… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 2:14 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Finally Gets a Map Blog: Yahoo and Microsoft have had mapping blogs for a while, but not Google — at least not until today, when the Google Lat Long Blog, which covers Maps, Earth, Local and the mapping API, made its debut. Now where’s the MapQuest blog? Via Ogle Earth…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 8:00 PM
Categories: Blogs, Google Earth, Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
How Online Maps Update Their Data After Major Road Closures: This week has revealed a lot about how the online mapping sites respond to disasters that close major routes and affect driving directions. Within two days of the MacArthur Maze freeway collapse in Oakland, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and MapQuest had updated their web sites and revised their recommended driving… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, May 3, 2007 at 8:28 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps, Roads, San Francisco, Seattle
Virtual Earth Imagery Updated Monthly: Virtual Earth imagery updates are apparently a monthly thing now: here’s news of the latest, which includes updates for Italy, France, Mexico, Canada and the U.S., including more U.S. bird’s-eye imagery…. Read more →; Posted on Friday, April 27, 2007 at 6:08 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Updates in Asia, Eastern Europe: Reports from Google Maps Mania and Google Karten that city and road data for several more countries have been added to, or upgraded in, Google Maps. In Europe, which first got streets a year ago, Croatia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania and Turkey seem to have detailed roads; Greece’s roads have apparently… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 3:26 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo India Maps: Mapperz discovers that Yahoo India has maps (or possibly that Yahoo Maps has India). I am bemused to see that India’s borders are exactly where the Indian government says they ought to be. Street data does not extend beyond those borders. There is satellite imagery; I wonder whether that too… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 1:59 PM
Categories: Online Maps
3D Buildings in Google Maps: Building outlines for some U.S. cities arrived in Google Maps a couple of months ago; now Stefan reports that the 3D buildings layer from Google Earth has been repurposed for Google Maps, as semi-transparent, oblique building shapes at the highest zoom levels. Something incremental is happening here, but I’m… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, April 12, 2007 at 9:45 AM
Categories: Online Maps
The Low Profile of Microsoft’s Mapping Effort: Why does Microsoft’s online mapping service get so little attention compared with Google’s? Peter Laudati thinks it’s because it’s gone through so many name changes, from Virtual Earth to Windows Live Local to whatever they’re calling it now — he counts at least eight web addresses that resolve to the… Read more →; 4
Posted on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 at 2:36 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Mapping Popular Locations in Online Maps: In a workshop paper called How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps (PDF), Danyel Fisher of Microsoft Research describes how he generated a heat map based on the server logs for Virtual Earth’s image tiles. The brighter the point on the map, the more that tile was… Read more →; Posted on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 8:33 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Google’s My Maps: A Roundup: O’Reilly Radar notes the fact that the maps are not only shareable, but searchable. Free GeoTools tests the accuracy of position markers generated in My Maps when they’re imported, as KML, into Google Earth: the test location was off by about 10 metres. There’s been a bit of consternation, apparently,… Read more →; Posted on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 7:12 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Google Maps Adds My Maps Feature: Clearly I go to bed too early. Late last night, Google Maps added a new feature called “My Maps,” which seems to be Google’s response to the collections feature in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth/Windows Live Local/Live Maps. In a nutshell, it’s a dead-easy way to create maps using an in-map click-and-drag… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, April 5, 2007 at 8:23 AM
Categories: Online Maps
New Version of Live Maps: A new iteration of Live Maps — which appears to be the latest name of Virtual Earth or Windows Live Local or whatever Microsoft comes up with next; this’ll be the third name in as many years — was announced this afternoon. New features include RSS/GeoRSS support for collections, user… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 9:07 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Reverts to Pre-Katrina New Orleans Imagery: Google has apparently replaced post-Katrina images of New Orleans with imagery from before the hurricane clobbered the city, and people are upset about that, the AP reports (choose your source for the same article: Boston Globe, Guardian, Houston Chronicle, Huffington Post, USA Today). My reaction to this depends on… Read more →; Posted on Friday, March 30, 2007 at 8:42 AM
Categories: Hurricanes 2005, New Orleans, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
More Virtual Earth Imagery Updates: Hot on Google’s heels, there’s a major imagery update for Virtual Earth, with dozens of cities in Europe and the U.S. getting bird’s-eye photography, as well as high-resolution orthoimagery coming to a number of U.S. and Canadian locales. Previously: Virtual Earth Bird’s Eye Imagery for Europe…. Read more →; Posted on Friday, March 30, 2007 at 8:07 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Trans-Atlantic Driving Directions: For a giggle, have a look at Google Maps’s driving directions from New York to Dublin, Ireland. Take special note of step 23. Lord help us if this makes its way into dashboard navigation systems. Via Kottke. Update: The MetaFilter post has other trans-oceanic combinations. Update #2: Gadling picks it… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2007 at 9:33 AM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps
Interest in Old Maps Surges in Japan: Yahoo Japan’s “Tokyo Tours With Old Maps” feature, which launched in January, has apparently kindled an interest in antique maps in Japan, The Japan Times reports. Not only is Yahoo’s site — not that I can read Japanese, but does anyone have a URL? — more popular than expected, but… Read more →; 2
Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2007 at 9:18 AM
Categories: Antique Maps, Online Maps
MapQuest’s Send-to-Cell Feature: Gizmodo disses on MapQuest’s send-to-cell feature, now in beta, which sends directions via SMS to your mobile phone: “In this day and age of mobile Google Maps and Windows Live Maps already on smartphones and dumbphones, only a few people would really need to plan out their directions beforehand and… Read more →; Posted on Monday, March 26, 2007 at 9:54 AM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
An Online Maps Roundup: Minor news items from the major online mapping services. Photos come to Google Maps — or at least photographs of businesses can appear in info windows when searching for them using local search. The Live Maps/Virtual Earth blog has been on fire with tips and tricks for using Virtual Earth… Read more →; Posted on Monday, March 12, 2007 at 8:31 PM
Categories: Online Maps
More Google Imagery Updates: Recent updates to the satellite and aerial imagery in Google Maps and Earth include 50-cm resolution imagery for Switzerland and Denmark, high-resolution (10 m) terrain for Switzerland, several French cities, full coverage for Utah and Wyoming, and a number of other local improvements, Google Earth Blog reports. Previously: High-Resolution Satellite… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, March 1, 2007 at 1:39 PM
Categories: Google Earth, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Adds Traffic Conditions: Google Maps adds traffic conditions for 30 U.S. cities, appearing as another mode beside Map, Satellite and Hybrid: “If your route shows red, you’re looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you’ve got smooth sailing.”… Read more →; 3
Posted on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 6:12 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Traffic Conditions
NAVTEQ vs. Tele Atlas: If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll recall that the mapping data for most of the online mapping services, and for the driving directions on GPS navigation systems, invariably comes from one of two map database suppliers: NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. With that kind of duopoly, we… Read more →; Posted on Monday, February 26, 2007 at 4:44 PM
Categories: GPS, Online Maps
A Google Maps Roundup: Last week, Google launched Google Maps Australia, adding driving directions, business listings and mobile devices support to preexisting maps. (Previously: Australia, New Zealand Geocoding in Google Maps; Google Maps Adds Streets for Australia and New Zealand.) Last month, Google added maps to its Google Book Search. The Stoa Consortium looks… Read more →; 1
Posted on Monday, February 12, 2007 at 9:05 PM
Categories: Online Maps
James’s Adventures in Online Mapping and Real Estate: It’s one thing to talk about online mapping tools in the abstract, or to play around with them a little bit, but quite another to use them to achieve a specific goal. James Fee’s recent experience using a few different online systems to look for a new house is therefore… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, February 8, 2007 at 8:46 AM
Categories: Online Maps
What Virtual Earth Bugs Do You Want Fixed?: The Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog is asking for users’ top five bugs they’d like fixed: “List your most nagging bugs. Tell us about the usability issue that bites you everyday. Or the feature of the site that if tweaked slightly would help you better complete a task. Or the… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 7:19 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Around and Around and Around and Around: Google gets a bit confused on the road to North Brunswick, New Jersey, Valleywag reports. Update, 1/23: Google has corrected the directions, but Chad has screenshots if you missed it…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, January 22, 2007 at 10:20 AM
Categories: Driving Directions, Mapping Errors, Online Maps
Virtual Earth Bird’s Eye Imagery for Europe: New bird’s-eye imagery for Virtual Earth, this time covering more than 100 European cities — mostly in Italy, France and Germany, but also the Netherlands, Spain, and one city in Norway. (Though technically we should also say Monaco, since Monte Carlo is listed but as part of France.) Update, 1/23:… Read more →; Posted on Monday, January 22, 2007 at 7:40 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Correcting Directions: Dave Winer discovers a better route than the directions suggested by Google Maps, and wonders: “So — when does mapping become a two-way app? I’d be willing to tell their software that I have a better route, it’s one that comes from living here, and being a cab driver here.”… Read more →; 4
Posted on Saturday, January 20, 2007 at 7:05 AM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps
Microsoft Inks Deal for Improved Imagery: And the satellite imagery arms race continues. Via James comes news of a deal between Microsoft and GlobeXplorer that will add more than a million square kilometres of high-resolution imagery to Virtual Earth…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, January 9, 2007 at 7:36 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
iPhone Includes Google Maps: During his Macworld keynote presentation today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs just announced the iPhone, Apple’s mobile phone that doubles as an iPod and Internet communicator. One of the features announced for this phone — which won’t be shipping until June — is a customized version of Google Maps that… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, January 9, 2007 at 3:01 PM
Categories: Macintosh, Mobile Devices, Online Maps
Maps and Directions for the Blind: A couple of recent items about maps and directions for the visually impaired. Rachel Magario, a blind graduate student at Kansas University, is working to create tactile campus maps — “maps for the blind that are created by the blind” — the Lawrence Journal-World reports. The maps will take note… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, December 27, 2006 at 11:49 AM
Categories: Miscellany, Online Maps
Google-Endoxon Update: I didn’t know much about the implications of Google’s Endoxon purchase when I blogged it last week, but your comments helped a great deal. Stefan at Ogle Earth has even more information, with more on Endoxon itself; he also links to an article in Swiss paper Le Temps and, since… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 9:24 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo Integrates Maps and Mail: My impression of Yahoo’s mapping stuff is that it lags behind the competition in terms of satellite imagery and mashups, but they’re ahead of the game in terms of integrating it with their other services (Exhibit A: Flickr maps). The announcement that maps are integrated into the non-beta version of… Read more →; 3
Posted on Friday, December 22, 2006 at 8:57 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Virtual Earth Updates: 3D City Textures, Italy: A major update to Virtual Earth this week: new three-dimensional city textures for Minneapolis-St. Paul, Tacoma, Sacramento, the L.A. suburbs and Irving, Texas on the one hand; a massive imagery and terrain update for Italy on the other. James explores terrain, interface and 3D texture upgrades; Stefan surmises that the… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 at 8:23 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Updates: India, Singapore, Hong Kong: Google Maps Mania reports Google Maps updates — streets and roads, place names, cities — for India, Singapore and Hong Kong. Previously: Google Maps Africa Update; Google Maps Updates for Brazil and Japan…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 at 8:16 AM
Categories: Hong Kong, Online Maps
Google Buys Endoxon: Google has acquired Swiss mapping company Endoxon — or at least its Internet, mapping and data processing units; the cartography, analysis and geodata units have been spun off as Mappuls AG. The acquisition is apparently meant to bolster the technology behind Google Maps and Earth, and to help the European… Read more →; 4
Posted on Monday, December 18, 2006 at 9:30 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Virtual Earth Upgrades: Improvements to Virtual Earth announced this week include a new navigation control for bird’s-eye imagery and a new distance-measurement tool; James likes…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 11:10 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Microsoft Put Technology Before Experience: Berkowitz: A profile in the International Herald Tribune of Microsoft’s new online services chief Steve Berkowitz sheds some light on how the software giant develops its web services (including its maps, of course). Berkowitz isn’t shy about criticizing Microsoft’s past practices: Microsoft lost its way, Berkowitz said, because it became too… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, December 10, 2006 at 11:19 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Were the Kims Led Astray by Online Maps?: On the other hand, sometimes stories about being led astray by navigation systems aren’t so amusing. The tech community has been concerned about the disappearance of CNet senior editor James Kim and his family while on vacation: his family was found alive and safe yesterday, but the search for James… Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 at 10:00 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Mapping Errors, Online Maps
Mobile Maps Compared: Gizmodo compares Windows Live Search for Mobile and Google Maps Mobile on a phone running Windows Mobile, and finds the Google option wanting, but then the Microsoft app was native and the Google app was coded in Java: “Google Maps on Java ran like Java always does. Painfully.” Previously: Google… Read more →; Posted on Monday, December 4, 2006 at 8:52 AM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
Google Transit Feed Specification: If you want your city to be included in Google Transit, point them to the Google Transit Feed Specification, which sets out the format in which the transit data must be encoded. Via Google Blog. Previously: Google Transit Adds Five Cities; Google Transit…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 at 8:56 PM
Categories: Mass Transit, Online Maps
Microsoft Mapping Roundup: Chandu Thota is leaving the Virtual Earth/MapPoint group to join another group within Microsoft. He’s been there four years, during which time we heard about a good deal of his work. For example, some previous entries: Thota on Virtual Earth APIs; Programming MapPoint in .NET; New BlogMap API, Features. The… Read more →; Posted on Monday, November 20, 2006 at 10:14 AM
Categories: Georeferencing, Online Maps
Google Maps Click-to-Call: Even as Google was announcing a new calling feature on Google Maps, which allows people to enter their phone number on a map-based business search result and have Google connect them to that business for free (even if it’s long distance), Valleywag was pointing out the prank possibilities of the… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, November 17, 2006 at 8:02 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo! Maps Out of Beta; Europe Update: Our recent discussions of Yahoo! Maps’s features have focused, it must be said, on their new, beta version rather than their older, default version: you have had to choose the new version deliberately. Until today: Yahoo! announces that the beta is now default for broadband users; the older version remains… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, November 16, 2006 at 2:53 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Another Virtual Earth 3D Roundup: Links regarding the Virtual Earth 3D launch last week have been piling up in my files; time once more to clear out the queue and share them with you. Brian Flood takes a good look at some of Virtual Earth 3D’s details (controls, API, file format). Pace Frank Taylor’s initial… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 at 8:07 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Africa Update: Google Maps has added highway and street data for some African localities, Google Karten and Google Maps Mania report. They report Johannesburg and Cairo with street-level maps; I checked Algiers and it’s got them too. Other localities have major routes only: for example, I checked Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso — it… Read more →; Posted on Friday, November 10, 2006 at 12:05 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo! Maps Road Data Upgrade: Europe, at least, “now has roads, and rivers and normal map stuff like that” in Yahoo! Maps, Rev Dan Catt reports…. Read more →; Posted on Friday, November 10, 2006 at 7:15 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Virtual Earth for Japan: In other Virtual Earth news, a localized version for Japan was also launched yesterday, replete with geocoding, yellow pages, road maps and satellite imagery…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 at 11:10 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Virtual Earth 3D Roundup: Reactions to, and follow-up stories about, yesterday’s announcement of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D thingy (previously): The AP story focuses on the Microsoft vs. Google implications of this release (via MapHist). In that vein, Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog says, noting the specific system and browser requirements (IE 6 or… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 at 10:53 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Virtual Earth 3D: CNet reports the launch of Virtual Earth 3D, a component of Live Search that integrates three-dimensional models of 15 U.S. cities (so far) into search results — a flyover/Flight Simulator view, I suppose. Comes with virtual billboards for advertising. Microsoft’s press release is here. Update, 6:25 PM: The WLL/Virtual Earth… Read more →; Posted on Monday, November 6, 2006 at 5:54 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
MapQuest 21st in Alexa Rankings: Very Spatial notes that MapQuest is 21st in Alexa’s rankings of popular web sites, which sounds impressive for a standalone map site. But, a couple of caveats. One, Alexa’s methodology is kind of like the Nielsen ratings — it gathers its metrics from a user-installed web browser toolbar. Two, from… Read more →; Posted on Monday, October 30, 2006 at 9:10 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Ogle Earth on Google Integration Opportunities: Stefan speculates on some of the potential ways that Google’s mapping products could be integrated into its other services and products, as per a recent company directive to make their stuff work together better…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, October 30, 2006 at 8:38 PM
Categories: Google Earth, Online Maps
Firefox 2.0 and Online Maps: Now that Firefox 2.0 is out, we can look at how it handles the complex code behind online map services. Fantom Planet finds that it handles Google and Yahoo! Maps well, but runs into a few quirks with Live Local. (Figures.) Also looks at some of the browser’s new features… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, October 25, 2006 at 8:13 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Software
New Popular Edition Maps Online: The New Popular Mapping site is a rough and ready interface to out-of-copyright (i.e., more than 50 years old) Ordnance Survey maps of England, most of which are from the postwar New Popular Edition series. It’s basically an alpha in the midst of testing, and there’s a ton of… Read more →; Posted on Monday, October 23, 2006 at 9:21 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Online Maps
Imagery Comes to MapQuest: What? MapQuest now has satellite/aerial imagery? When did that happen? See previous entries: More About MapQuest’s Future; MapQuest at 10; AP: MapQuest and the Competition…. Read more →; Posted on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 8:29 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps on a Palm TX: Google’s announcement yesterday of a new Treo version of Google Maps for Mobile made me wonder whether it would also work on WiFi-equipped Palm handhelds, despite their absence from the list of compatible devices. Now, I don’t have a Palm with WiFi — I’ve all but retired my Tungsten T2… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 6:51 AM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
How Current Are Online Maps?: David Naffziger wonders which online mapping service has the most current maps and finds that for Chandler, Arizona (where rapid growth allows the maps to be dated relatively precisely), Yahoo! seems to be a step or two ahead of the competition. I wonder whether that holds true for all locations…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, October 9, 2006 at 9:45 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps Netherlands: Initially I didn’t get the significance of yesterday’s launch of Google Maps Netherlands (see Google Maps Mania, Google Karten and Ogle Earth), especially since parts of Europe got Google Maps coverage last April. But, as Webmapper points out, the Netherlands only now joins France, Germany, Italy, and Spain in having… Read more →; 2
Posted on Wednesday, October 4, 2006 at 8:27 PM
Categories: Online Maps
MapQuest Upgraded: Cartography reports that MapQuest’s interface and graphics have been upgraded; you can now, for example, pan around the map by dragging, like you can with all the other major online map services…. Read more →; 1
Posted on Wednesday, October 4, 2006 at 7:43 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Another Google Imagery Update: Another update to Google’s satellite imagery today, Maps and Earth at the same time. Here’s an announcement. Via Google Earth Blog; I expect Frank Taylor will be adding to the list as more updates are discovered. See previous entry: Google Imagery Update…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 3:49 PM
Categories: Google Earth, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
A9 Removes Maps: Amazon’s A9 search engine has discontinued its street-level imagery and maps. Via All Points Blog. See previous entry: A9 Adds Maps…. Read more →; 1
Posted on Monday, October 2, 2006 at 8:27 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Transit Adds Five Cities: Google Transit, the trip planner that includes public transportation data, started last December (see previous entry) with Portland, Oregon as its single city, presumably as a proof of concept. Today they’ve added five more cities: Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tampa, and Eugene, Oregon. See also Google Maps Mania…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 at 10:13 PM
Categories: Cities, Mass Transit, Online Maps, Pittsburgh, Seattle
Google Maps Updates for Brazil and Japan: Google Maps has added road data for Brazil — no address search yet, though — and updated the map tiles for Japan, allowing (apparently) hybrid mode. See also Google Maps Mania, Google Karten…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, September 26, 2006 at 7:41 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Live Local/Virtual Earth Update: More features have been added to Windows Live Local, the eponymous blog reports, including people search, the ability to send address details to your mobile phone, and enhanced drawing tools that include the ability to draw shapes — i.e., enclosed polygons, not just points and lines, which is something I’ve… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 7:37 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Imagery Update: There are reports here and there that Google has updated its satellite imagery. The images are certainly loading differently for me: lower-resolution photos are being used at wider zoom levels, and they seem to be cached differently. More as more reports come in. Update: Frank’s list of updated locations is… Read more →; Posted on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 1:38 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Australia, New Zealand Geocoding in Google Maps: Geocoding has arrived for two more countries in Google Maps: Google Maps Mania reports that it’s now possible to search for addresses in Australia and New Zealand. See previous entry: Google Maps Adds Streets for Australia and New Zealand. Update: Announcement on the Google Maps API blog…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, September 6, 2006 at 9:16 PM
Categories: Online Maps
UK Geocoding in Virtual Earth: Map GIS News Blog Etc. Etc. reports that Virtual Earth/Live Local now has geocoding for the U.K., which means that searching for British addresses is now possible…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 9:21 AM
Categories: Online Maps
The Accuracy of Online Street Maps: Cartography has an excellent post about the accuracy of online street maps, made with devastating effectiveness by comparing screenshots of the same location from the different services, most of which, it turns out, are wrong…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 7:21 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Tele Atlas Introduces Map Feedback: When it comes to mapping data, the flow is usually downhill: from the mapping data providers to the companies providing it to the consumers (GPS, online maps). The problem, of course, is that the map data may be wrong or, thanks to the time it takes to traverse the chain,… Read more →; 2
Posted on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 at 9:04 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo! Updates Satellite Imagery for Cities: Yahoo! reports that it has added high-resolution satellite imagery for nearly 30 metropolitan areas outside the United States, and upgraded the imagery for U.S. cities as well. See previous entries: Yahoo! International Satellite Imagery; Yahoo! Maps Satellite Imagery…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, August 16, 2006 at 8:54 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Now Has Saved Locations: Saved locations come to Google Maps — if you have a Google account, that is. Locations you search for will be automatically saved by default; you can add them manually as well. See also Google Maps Mania…. Read more →; Posted on Friday, August 4, 2006 at 4:20 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Windows Live Local and Australia: The Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog: “This week we rolled out a new release of Live Local featuring full support for Australia.” Streets, geocoding, directions, business listings and more aerial imagery…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at 9:29 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps for Mobile Adds Traffic Conditions: Traffic conditions for 30 U.S. cities — and directions with driving-time estimates based on those conditions — have been added to the mobile version (i.e., for cell phones) of Google Maps. See previous entry: Google Local for Mobile…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at 10:12 AM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
Windows Live Toolbar Mapping Features: Microsoft’s new Windows Live toolbar (IE 6 on Windows only, naturally) has a couple of mapping features of note, the Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog reports, namely, the ability to compile a list of addresses from a web page and map them and the ability to take an address on… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at 9:55 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Software
Online Map Review Roundup: The Dallas Morning News reviews the big four mapping sites: “It takes awhile to get the hang of the software giant’s relatively new Windows Live Local service, but it’s a powerful tool. Google and Yahoo Inc. make strong showings, and AOL LLC’s MapQuest — the most popular mapping site on… Read more →; Posted on Monday, July 24, 2006 at 10:35 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo! International Satellite Imagery: Yahoo! has added high-resolution satellite imagery for a number of “international” (read: non-U.S.) cities. They list a fair number in Mexico, a few in Canada, and several in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Cartography compares the imagery with Google Maps by looking at how each service displays a single… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 9:34 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
MapQuest: Multi-stop Route Builder: All Points Blog reports that MapQuest has released a beta of a new (for them) thing for their directions feature: multi-point route building (press release). See previous entry: More About MapQuest’s Future…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 9:25 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Online Maps
New Satellite Imagery Comes to Google Maps: Google Maps Mania reports that, as expected, the new high-resolution satellite imagery that came to Google Earth earlier this month has now trickled down to Google Maps…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 10:43 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
More Online Map Reviews: CNet’s review of the major mapping sites — part of an ongoing comparative look at “Web 2.0”-style web applications — concludes that Google Maps has been surpassed by Yahoo! and Microsoft in terms of features, and gives Yahoo! the nod for best overall mapping service. From the review: “But which… Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, June 13, 2006 at 12:54 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Online Map Mindshare: Stefan compares U.S.-only data from Hitwise and Google Trends that attempt to approximate mindshare for the various mapping sites (and which show MapQuest way out in front) with the equivalent global Google Trends data, and comes to the following conclusion, which I found interesting: “MapQuest’s brand awareness is largely a… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006 at 8:43 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Major Windows Live Local Update: Windows Live Local got a major update today; see the official blog for an overview of what they call “the biggest release yet of Windows Live Local.” The update includes real-time traffic data (the TechCrunch post covering the launch has an example and comparison with Yahoo!’s service) and, according to… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 10:11 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
When Will We See Street-Level Maps of Mexico?: GPS Tracklog reports that TeleAtlas has acquired source data for Mexican streets and highways. Just last week I was bemoaning the total lack of data on Mexico in Google Maps — I wanted to look up something specific in Nayarit State. I can only hope that this Mexican data will… Read more →; 1
Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 10:25 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps Adds Streets for Australia and New Zealand: Google Maps Mania reports that Google Maps has added street data for Australia and New Zealand. See previous entries: Google Maps for Britain and Ireland; Google Maps for Japan; Major Google Maps European Update…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 at 3:11 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Red Herring: Online Maps and Local Advertising: Red Herring: While not as monomaniacal as the cartographers in Mr. Borges’ fictional empire, the mapmakers busy at work at search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN place a very high value on maps. And their designs don’t lack ambition. In order to tap a local advertising market that the… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 9:02 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Ask.com Relief Maps: I didn’t pay much attention when Ask.com unveiled its own mapping service a little while back, but now they’ve done something that no other online mapping service has done yet: they’ve added a relief map layer. It only works on the higher zoom layers, and it doesn’t work with Safari… Read more →; 4
Posted on Saturday, May 6, 2006 at 9:18 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Major Google Maps European Update: First there was a massive update of Google Earth’s satellite and aerial photography, much of which affected (and improved) the imagery for Europe. Then that imagery was carried over to Google Maps, which again had an impact on European views. Then, yesterday, driving directions came to some European locations in… Read more →; 4
Posted on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 at 7:27 AM
Categories: Driving Directions, Google Earth, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
It’s Google Maps Again: Google has changed its collective mind, and changed Google Local back to Google Maps. Now it’s up to Microsoft to do the right thing, too — and fix that abominably named Windows Live Local. See previous entry: Google Maps: No Longer Beta, No Longer Maps…. Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 at 2:27 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Online Mapping Sites Compared Again: Another mapping site comparison, this one from PCWorld.ca (via Cartography). I think we’re at the point where we’re going to see a lot of these: enough time has passed since last year’s betas were announced that (1) they’re mature enough to review and (2) the tech press has now had… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 11:56 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Online Maps for the Visually Impaired: A List Apart, the web site about web design, tackles the question of making online maps accessible for visually impaired users. Even though maps are essentially a visual medium, it’s not as strange as it may seem: for author Seth Duffey, it’s a matter of providing data inside a web-based… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 at 10:16 AM
Categories: Online Maps
TechCrunch Compares Mapping Services: On TechCrunch, Frank Gruber compares the features of five online mapping services — Ask, Google, MapQuest, Windows Live Local and Yahoo! — and draws the following conclusion: “Overall, Yahoo Maps was by far the best application tested. Its fast Flash interface, multipoint directions, live traffic information, and easy send-to-mobile feature… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 7:26 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Forbes on Online Mapping Sites’ Traffic and Income: Forbes.com has an article on the online mapping business that focuses, naturally, on the business side of things, namely, traffic and income. Some interesting tidbits: Traffic to online mapping sites is up 20 per cent over last year. Yahoo! Maps actually got more traffic than Google Maps in March: 20… Read more →; Posted on Monday, April 17, 2006 at 9:39 AM
Categories: Online Maps
More About MapQuest’s Future: Over at Directions Magazine, Adena interviews a MapQuest manager, Christian Dwyer, about the company’s future directions. Included in her article is the following nugget: “MapQuest won’t be left behind: aerials are coming back in a future offering, as are ‘live maps’ with real time panning (a la Google Maps), and… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, April 16, 2006 at 3:20 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Yahoo! Maps Satellite Imagery: Satellite imagery was added to the Yahoo! Maps beta last night; high-resolution (1-metre) imagery is now available for the continental U.S.; the rest of the world must make do with medium-resolution (15-metre) imagery. Yahoo! says that they’ve also taken the time to process the imagery so that it doesn’t have… Read more →; 1
Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 at 8:57 AM
Categories: Online Maps
MapQuest’s Mobile Strategy: You’ll recall that it was previously reported that MapQuest was responding to the challenge posed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! by moving in an altogether different direction: instead of a hackable API, satellite imagery and web interface innovations (although an API did show up last month), it was going to… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, April 6, 2006 at 9:58 PM
Categories: Mobile Devices, Online Maps
Again: Navteq in San Diego: Still another profile of a digital mapping data provider’s employees as they survey the streets of (insert your town name here): this time it’s Navteq in San Diego. Via Cartography, with whom I’m in agreement: where are all these stories coming from? Is this the typical media pack mentality (i.e.,… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 at 8:48 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Surveying
Another Profile: Navteq in New York: Stories about the digital mapping data companies keep coming in; the latest is a CNNMoney.com profile of Navteq in which the streets being profiled are New York’s. It’s from last month, but GPS Review spotted it today. I’m noticing a formula: profile one company (but not the other); mention one… Read more →; 1
Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 at 9:07 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Surveying
TeleAtlas in Santa Fe: Another article on field data collection by the digital mapping data companies, this time from the Santa Fe New Mexican, looking at TeleAtlas’s work scouring the streets of Santa Fe. Via All Points Blog. See previous entries: More on Digital Map Field Researchers; CNet Profiles TeleAtlas; SF Chronicle: Digital Map… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 at 8:27 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Surveying
Virtual Earth at Street Level: Virtual Earth is working on adding street-level images; it’s only a preview so far (viewable here; works in Firefox but not Safari) and only for San Francisco and Seattle. It’s basically the same as the A9 imagery that made the rounds last year. It’s fun, but I’m not sure how… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, March 2, 2006 at 8:54 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Link Roundup for February 24: Yes, I’m still alive. Should be back to normal on Monday. Meanwhile: The centre of Google Maps’s universe is apparently Coffeyville, Kansas. And you thought talking on the phone while driving is bad. You’d think that consulting a map while driving wasn’t the safest thing, but it turns out that… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 at 7:50 AM
Categories: Conferences, GPS, Online Maps, Triangulations (Links)
MapQuest at 10: MapQuest turned 10 years old yesterday; Westword has a long article by Alan Prendergast that looks at the company’s history and recent challenges — viz., the extra features provided by its competition. As has been reported before, MapQuest is rather skeptical of the features, APIs, and high-resolution imagery provided by… Read more →; 1
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2006 at 7:59 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Link Roundup for January 29: I’ve been off my feed a bit this past week, so I’ve got some catching up to do. I’ll start with a few random links from here and there about this and that. From the Google Blog: “Not only have we added extensive 6-inch imagery for many parts of the… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, January 29, 2006 at 6:05 PM
Categories: Current Events, GPS, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial, Software
Link Roundup for January 21: A clickable map of Tlingit tribes, clans and clan houses in the Pacific Northwest. Via Plep. MapPoint B2B on the future of MSN Maps and Directions, viz., none: “The time has come to say good-bye to MSN Maps and Directions and say hello to Windows Live Local. The product team… Read more →; Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 7:50 AM
Categories: Books, Historical Maps, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial, Software
Link Roundup for January 17: I’ve got to hunker down and produce a big post about the controversial Chinese map that purportedly proves that the Chinese discovered the Americas, but in the meantime, here are a few links about satellite images, online maps and advertising. This AP wire story about satellite images and privacy raises… Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 9:44 AM
Categories: Censorship, Security & Privacy, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Virtual India: The first public build of Virtual India (the Microsoft Research project with imagery that satisfies Indian security concerns; see previous entry) is now online, according to the Virtual Earth blog. Four languages; street maps for Bangalore only; works in Firefox but not in Safari…. Read more →; 1
Posted on Monday, January 16, 2006 at 9:48 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Link Roundup for January 13: If I make these posts a regular occurrence, I’ll have to come up with a catchier title. Anyway, onward, with a few things about online maps and a couple of conferences to tell you about: Ads appearing on Google Maps? We kind-of, sort-of knew it was coming. Blue pins representing… Read more →; Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 at 8:30 AM
Categories: Conferences, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial, Software
Link Roundup for January 12: As an experiment, a lot of new links at once: A new Google Earth blog with a rather unwieldy title: Using Google Earth for Earth Science and Remote Sensing (via Ogle Earth). The Prejudice Map is built by querying Google with phrases like “Germans are known for” and pasting up… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 at 9:41 AM
Categories: Blogs, Conferences, Groups & Societies, Libraries, Map Thefts, Miscellany, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Programming MapPoint in .NET: Chandu Thota announces that his new book, Programming MapPoint in .NET, which covers APIs for MapPoint 2004, MapPoint Web Service, Microsoft Location Server and Virtual Earth, is now available. A sample chapter is available via O’Reilly’s online catalogue, and there’s a support site for the book as well. James Fee… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, January 5, 2006 at 10:04 AM
Categories: Books, Online Maps
AP Article on Online Maps, Features: A followup to the AP wire story that made the rounds last week, by the same writer, looking at what Google et al. do with the digital mapping data: Roads, highways are just the beginning for digital maps. Via GPS Tracklog…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, January 3, 2006 at 1:33 PM
Categories: Online Maps
More on Digital Map Field Researchers: Another look at the digital mapping data providers (i.e., NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas), how they collect their data on the ground, and how it ends up in the hands of Google, Yahoo, et al., from an Associated Press wire story that ended up in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Via GeoCarta. See… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, December 27, 2005 at 8:09 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Surveying
Windows Live Local Privacy Update: Microsoft developer Chandu Thota responds to concerns about how Windows Live Local gets its “Location Finder” data (about which see previous entry) by explaining how it’s done: Location Finder sends signal strengths and MAC addresses of nearby wireless access points and standard HTTP request information such as your IP address… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, December 15, 2005 at 3:04 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Some Windows Live Local Updates: The Windows Live Local announcements on the Virtual Earth and MSN Search blogs. Via Boing Boing, some privacy concerns regarding where Microsoft gets its “Location Finder” data were raised on the Geowanking mailing list. James Fee is disappointed with the bird’s-eye view: “I know people say it is good… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, December 9, 2005 at 10:48 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Transit: In other Google News: Google Transit, which seems to be an in-house mashup of Google Maps and public transit data. It calculates costs and displays bus and rail routes and times; the examples give some idea of the parameters you can enter: not only addresses, but also leave-at/arrive-by times. Portland,… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, December 8, 2005 at 9:21 PM
Categories: Mass Transit, Online Maps, Portland
Windows Live Local Goes Live: Windows Live is Microsoft’s repackaging of its web services, and Windows Live Local is to Virtual Earth what Google Local (see previous entry) is to Google Maps. (Or have I got that backwards?) Anyway, Windows Live Local went live this morning. Unfortunately I’ve got a pile of errands to do… Read more →; 2
Posted on Thursday, December 8, 2005 at 8:19 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Virtual Earth to Become Windows Live Local: A new version of Virtual Earth, to be renamed Windows Live Local, is due to be released imminently if not later today. The release apparently includes the oblique (bird’s-eye) imagery that made such a stir when Virtual Earth was previewed last spring (see previous entry). Updates to follow as needed…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, December 7, 2005 at 2:30 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Virtual Earth Dashboard Widget: A Virtual Earth Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and a tutorial explaining how it was done. See previous entries: More Widgets; Houston Traffic Widget; Dashboard Widgets…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, December 1, 2005 at 3:16 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Macintosh, Online Maps
Business Week Reviews Google Maps: The thing that annoyed me most about that AP article was that it was picked up by clueless news organizations who ran it under headlines to the effect that MapQuest was leading the hot online mapping sector, when the truth — after years of dominance, MapQuest’s rivals are innovating their… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 at 11:37 AM
Categories: Online Maps
AP: MapQuest and the Competition: This AP story about MapQuest (alternate link) more or less states the obvious: that despite its market leading position, MapQuest is under threat from its mapping rivals whose innovations make MapQuest look like it’s standing still. Exhibits in evidence include the lack of an API or satellite imagery — once… Read more →; Posted on Saturday, November 26, 2005 at 11:59 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Question: Google Maps and Old Versions of Safari: Google Maps may no longer work in older versions of Safari, Apple’s web browser. Joel Riggs wrote yesterday: “For the past 24 hours it appears that maps.google.com (aka Google Local) is not loading in Safari browsers … is this an ‘upgrade’ that fails the test of backwards compatability?” He’s using… Read more →; 2
Posted on Friday, November 25, 2005 at 9:20 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Questions
Yahoo! Directions on an iPod: iPods have been used for subway maps before (see previous entries: 1, 2, 3); now this site generates driving directions from Yahoo! Maps that can be exported to a photo-capable (i.e., colour-screen) iPod. Via Scoble…. Read more →; Posted on Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 3:01 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Mobile Devices, Online Maps, Roads
Google Local for Mobile: Last month I mentioned that MapQuest was moving into mobile devices and even paper; I said it was a good idea, because maps are more useful when they’re portable. Online map services are fine and good in front of the computer, but you can’t take them with you; despite a… Read more →; Posted on Monday, November 7, 2005 at 10:05 AM
Categories: Online Maps
CNet Profiles TeleAtlas: CNet’s Elinor Mills profiles TeleAtlas, one of several mapping data companies that provide the online map services with their data (along with NAVTEQ, for example, they provide data for both Google and Yahoo!). The article looks at data collection and how long it takes for the company’s updated data to… Read more →; Posted on Friday, November 4, 2005 at 11:09 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Surveying
Scoble on the Map Wars: We’re Doomed: Scoble says both Yahoo! Maps and Virtual Earth are doomed: “it’s not about maps, it’s about the advertising platform that Google has built. It’s not about prettiness, it’s about who has the most user generated content (I still hate that term)” (his emphasis). He argues that advertising opportunities and licencing… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, November 3, 2005 at 10:08 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Yahoo! Maps Upgrade: Breaking news: Yahoo! has upgraded its mapping service with a new, Flash-based beta version with substantial interface improvements. In the 15 seconds or so I’ve had to play with it, it works very well — the inset for zooming is a nice UI touch. Here’s Yahoo!’s feature list. Associated Press… Read more →; 4
Posted on Thursday, November 3, 2005 at 8:34 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Reviewing Online Map Services: Ambitious: Cartography is reviewing seven online map services this week, and as of today is already up to four (Google, Map24, Maporama, Mapquest). Still to come (as of this writing): MSN, Rand McNally and Yahoo! I’ve linked to the introductory post, which contains links to each of the reviews and… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, October 26, 2005 at 10:11 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Web Mapping and Usability: Directions reprints an article from Position magazine about usability in web mapping that argues for attention to target audience and usability testing. Worth a look if you’re interested in the design of web mapping services…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, October 20, 2005 at 8:33 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Virtual Earth Mobile: Here’s another Virtual Earth port/hack to an unexpected but welcome place: Virtual Earth for Windows Mobile — i.e. Pocket PCs and Windows-based smartphones. Via the Virtual Earth team blog and Spatially Adjusted. See previous entry: A Microsoft Roundup…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, October 17, 2005 at 7:20 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Google and Its Mapping Data Providers: It’s not necessarily common knowledge that Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft don’t produce the data for their maps; they buy it from other companies. But because they’re the front end, sometimes people make the assumption that it’s Google operatives running around with GPS receivers; rather, it’s companies like NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, October 13, 2005 at 10:46 PM
Categories: Online Maps
A Microsoft Roundup: In the past week or so, I’ve learned the following mapping news from Microsoft through map developer Chandu Thota’s blog: Overshadowed by the PDC stuff on Virtual Earth at the time, I guess, but version 4.0 of the MapPoint web service was released last month, and Chandu outlines the details… Read more →; Posted on Monday, October 10, 2005 at 7:45 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps, Software
Testing Driving Directions: CNet’s Elinor Mills ran an experiment: test the accuracy of the four major web map services — Google Maps, MapQuest, MSN and Yahoo! Maps — by following their directions between two points, one after the other, and timing how long it took. In the end, despite the fact that they… Read more →; Posted on Friday, October 7, 2005 at 9:25 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps: No Longer Beta, No Longer Maps: Google Maps Mania reports that Google Maps has dropped the “beta” moniker and is now branded as Google Local. There have been some layout changes to allow room for Local search results. Adding cartography to local search was, I think, Google’s whole point, even if the Google Maps API can… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, October 6, 2005 at 10:59 AM
Categories: Online Maps
What’s MapQuest Up To?: For a web service that’s been left out of the limelight by its upstart rivals for most of this year, MapQuest is suddenly generating some news interest: first by announcing a collaboration with GPS maker TomTom to produce a car-based routefinder using MapQuest’s maps; and then by announcing an upgraded… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, October 6, 2005 at 10:51 AM
Categories: Online Maps
SF Chronicle: Digital Map Field Researchers: Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a story about digital map data companies and their field researchers. I’ve mentioned stories about collecting data for map companies before (see previous entries: Online Maps’ Foot Soldiers; Backcountry Mapping). What’s different is the technology used by the field researchers; in the couple of years… Read more →; Posted on Monday, October 3, 2005 at 9:55 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Surveying
That Roman Villa Discovery Story: I’m totally the last person to be reporting this. A couple of weeks ago, Ogle Earth pointed to the story of Italian blogger Luca Mori (whose site seems to be down at the moment), who used Google Maps and Google Earth to discover the ruins of a Roman villa on… Read more →; 1
Posted on Saturday, September 24, 2005 at 3:36 PM
Categories: Google Earth, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Forbes: Mapping the Web’s Future: Forbes has a big-picture introduction to Google Maps applications and the growing trend of geotagging as much information on the web as possible. Via Cartography…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, September 21, 2005 at 2:00 PM
Categories: Geotagging, Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Killer Maps: It’s hard to believe that Google Maps was only released last February, especially when you consider how a huge web-based ecosystem has sprung up around it since then. But it didn’t spring from nothing. Killer Maps, the cover story for the October 2005 issue of Technology Review, looks at how… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 at 12:36 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google and Katrina: In addition to the Forbes article I mentioned yesterday, both the BBC and New York Times (free registration required) cover the use of Google Maps and Earth by ordinary users to collect and distribute information about the disaster — i.e., the “non-official” Google Earth overlays and Google Maps hacks (via… Read more →; Posted on Monday, September 5, 2005 at 11:50 AM
Categories: Google Earth, Hacks & Mashups, Hurricanes 2005, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial, Weather & Climate
Hurricane Katrina: Google Maps and Other Imagery: I’ve been getting e-mail from people asking about the state of various locations in and around New Orleans and other areas hit by Hurricane Katrina. I’m not the best person to answer such questions — I’m just someone from small-town western Quebec who runs a site about maps; I haven’t… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, September 4, 2005 at 9:38 PM
Categories: Hurricanes 2005, New Orleans, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial, Weather & Climate
Google Maps Hacking Roundup: The number of hacks and mashups of Google Maps prevents me from reporting on every single one of them properly, but I am paying attention, and will report on the more noteworthy ones, and on trends, when I can. The trouble is that there’s very little that can be said… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, August 21, 2005 at 10:58 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Hacking Virtual Earth: Rev Dan Catt says, “Even though Google get a lot of press for their API, I believe that Virtual Earth is far easier to code and gives you more hooks and feedback to use. … From a coding point of view in my humble opinion Virtual Earth is better. Google… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, August 21, 2005 at 5:05 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
LA Times: Maps Outpaced by Suburban Growth: From today’s edition of the LA Times, a story about how maps can’t keep up with the pace of suburban growth in fast-growing areas like California, Nevada and Arizona. Some of those areas add thousands of new streets a year. That’s right, thousands. You can imagine that traditional paper-based maps… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, August 21, 2005 at 11:05 AM
Categories: Cities, Online Maps, Roads, Surveying
A9 Adds Maps: A9, Amazon’s search engine, has for a while had street-level photos as a feature of its local search service (“Yellow Pages”), at least for a few U.S. cities. They’ve now added maps — from MapQuest, no less: you can view their street-level imagery by choosing a location from a map…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, August 18, 2005 at 10:21 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Flash Earth: Flash Earth presents Google Maps and Virtual Earth satellite imagery through a Flash application. Why a Flash application, you may ask? The creator, Paul Neave, explains why: [T]he interface is much smoother to use. You get a sense of location because you can zoom in and out without the display… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, August 17, 2005 at 6:30 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Plugin for OS X Address Book: As I’ve mentioned before, there are several hacks out there to change the Mac OS X Address Book’s address-mapping feature from MapQuest to other mapping services. (See previous entries: Map Sites: Hints, Tips and Observations; More Address Book Hacks.) The latest is the Google Maps Plugin, which adds contextual menu… Read more →; Posted on Friday, August 5, 2005 at 4:41 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Macintosh, Online Maps
Directions on MSN Virtual Earth: A week after the launch, Directions’s Adena Schutzberg takes a sober second look at MSN Virtual Earth, its features — including “Locate Me” and the Scratch Pad — and its (lack of) hacks. “While I tend to agree that for now MSN Virtual Earth is not ‘killer’ either as an… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, August 4, 2005 at 7:54 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
MSN Virtual Earth: Lessons Learned: From the MSN Search Weblog: what they’ve learned, one week after the release of MSN Virtual Earth. (I still think that launching too soon was the fundamental problem; a lot of the problems they agree need fixing were merely things that should have been finished first.)… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, August 3, 2005 at 6:25 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Geotagging Roundup: Geotagging comes in many flavours. First, let’s take a look at Tagzania, a web site where you can add keywords to specific geographic locations, and track that keyword via RSS. I’m not sure how scalable this concept is; imagine the chaos if every bar and lake on the planet are… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, July 31, 2005 at 10:08 PM
Categories: Geotagging, Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Google Maps Hacks of Live Events: Who says the data you mash up with Google Maps has to be static? Some of the best hacks are ones where the data is frequently updated, whether it’s daily or by the minute. For an example of the former, see this page tracking the biennial Transpac sailboat race between… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, July 29, 2005 at 10:44 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Google Maps on Mobile Devices: Getting Google Maps onto mobile devices is a natural step: when we’re going somewhere, we tend not to leave our maps behind, after all. One project was a hack to get Google Maps running on Series 60 Nokia phones, combining the Nokia Python SDK and data from a Bluetooth GPS;… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, July 29, 2005 at 9:23 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Mobile Devices, Online Maps, Software
Comparing Online Mapping Services: Last week, Robert Scoble asked whether anyone was doing a comparison of the online mapping services. He got a couple of capsule reviews in the comments, but I’m not aware of any major review. Reviewing the “big four” in online maps — Google Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps and MSN MapPoint… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, July 28, 2005 at 8:32 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Vintage Imagery from Virtual Earth: By now you’ve no doubt heard the one about MSN Virtual Earth “deleting” Apple’s headquarters. But it’s obviously not a case of Microsoft editing out its rivals; Microsoft is simply using very old imagery. For another example, the World Trade Center is still standing in Virtual Earth. The Manhattan imagery… Read more →; 4
Posted on Tuesday, July 26, 2005 at 4:41 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
MSN Virtual Earth Launches: Scoble was dropping hints Saturday that the launch of MSN Virtual Earth (previous entry) was coming up. The official launch is, in fact, mere minutes away as I write this. But, thanks to some last-minute testing, Virtual Earth was live for about 15 hours this weekend. People noticed, media embargoes… Read more →; 2
Posted on Sunday, July 24, 2005 at 11:39 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Hybrid Mode: Google Maps has introduced a so-called hybrid mode that overlays a street grid, names and route numbers on the satellite/aerial imagery. I have to confess that I’m awfully impressed by this; it really renders moot the question of switching between maps and photos, or creating a transparency between the two…. Read more →; 3
Posted on Friday, July 22, 2005 at 7:50 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Ordnance Survey Overlays on Multimap Aerial Photos: Nick writes on Here Be Dragons: “I was just playing with multimap.com’s aerial photograph feature, and noticed something I hadn’t seen mentioned on here before — Ordnance Survey map overlays applied dynamically on mouseover over the aerial photo.” Nick’s example. Google may get all the attention (here too, I have… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, July 15, 2005 at 11:07 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Using MapServer with Chameleon: Speaking of Tyler Mitchell, he’s got an article on Directions explaining Chameleon, a collection of PHP scripts that, he says, allows non-programmers to build web mapping applications using MapServer through its MapScript API…. Read more →; Posted on Friday, July 15, 2005 at 8:18 AM
Categories: GIS, Online Maps, Software
Google Maps for Japan: Google Maps now does Japan in the same detail it does North America and the UK. More about this from the Google Blog and Google Maps Mania…. Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, July 14, 2005 at 4:16 PM
Categories: Online Maps
MapSouthampton Adds Old Maps: MapSouthampton is Southampton City Council’s interacctive mapping service; it’s a Java-based map tool that allows you to view, pan and zoom several layers of data — the sort of slow, clunky web-based interface to GIS data that looks embarrassing since Google Maps came along. But I digress. The news is… Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, July 8, 2005 at 5:49 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Cities, Online Maps
Wired: Map Hacks on Crack: Today’s Wired News article, Map Hacks on Crack, covers the announcements of, rules for, and reactions to the Google and Yahoo! Maps APIs. “Both companies are hoping the new mapping APIs, or application programming interfaces, will excite developers, help the companies find new employees and, perhaps most importantly, result in… Read more →; Posted on Saturday, July 2, 2005 at 1:28 PM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Mapufacture and worldKit: The O’Reilly Network has an article by Mikel Maron, the creator of Mapufacture and worldKit, that introduces us to what those two tools can do. Mapufacture is a new service to browse, build, and share interactive web maps, on a global or local scale. It combines user-created geodata with freely… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 5:56 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Software
Boston Globe Coverage of Google Maps API: The Boston Globe’s Peter Howe has a story on the Google Maps API release (see previous entry), with a quote from yours truly…. Read more →; Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 8:10 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Yahoo! Maps API: Yahoo! Maps, not wanting to be counted out, also has an API; on a more basic level, see their guide to how to link to maps on their service. Via O’Reilly Radar. (Corrected.) Update: Jeffrey McManus: Why the Yahoo! Maps API Is Better than Brand X Maps API (via ProNet)…. Read more →; 1
Posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2005 at 4:01 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps API; More Google Links: Google has released an API for embedding Google Maps in your own web pages via JavaScript. Hacking Google Maps has just gone legit — not that Google seems to have had much complaint with the majority of the hacks out there. The main stipulation seems to be that the web… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2005 at 3:39 PM
Categories: Google Earth, Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Getting Lost with Mapping Sites: An article in yesterday’s New York Times (free registration required) about getting lost using the directions in online mapping services. Key graf: “Roughly 1 in 50 computer-generated directions is a dud, according to Doug Richardson, the executive director for the Association of American Geographers. He blames inaccurate road information for… Read more →; 1
Posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2005 at 10:40 AM
Categories: Online Maps
High-Resolution Google Satellite Maps for the Rest of the World: Pyramids, uploaded by Alison Biggs. Scavengeroogle and WorldChanging are among those who’ve discovered that Google Maps’s satellite imagery for the rest of the world just got a lot more detailed, with high-resolution images available for a number of cities and other locations outside North America. Which means a lot more… Read more →; 2
Posted on Wednesday, June 22, 2005 at 10:33 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Meets the U.S. Census: The mother of all mash-ups, perhaps: gCensus combines Google Maps with data from the 2000 U.S. Census — down to the block level. Via Boing Boing…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 at 8:21 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Google Maps Upgrades?: While there’s been no formal announcement of it, it looks like Google Maps has had an upgrade; reports of various improvements are trickling in from around the web. Scavengeroogle notes a change in the magnification slider; Here Be Dragons and Slashdot note that other countries besides Canada, the U.S., the… Read more →; 1
Posted on Sunday, June 19, 2005 at 10:42 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Mid-June Google Maps Roundup: Some more hacks, news and commentary about Google Maps that I’ve been saving up for another one of these roundup posts: Google Maps hacking gets mentioned on CNN (via Google Maps Mania). Google has deployed a 3D mapping truck in San Francisco, with the goal of having a three-dimensional framework… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, June 15, 2005 at 4:46 PM
Categories: Geotagging, Hacks & Mashups, Online Maps
Flash World Map Tool: The flash photoblog world map “plots images and locations onto a world map using latitude and longitude information,” and integrates with several blogging tools. Some database or XML hackery may be required. There’s also a Flickr version, with a related group…. Read more →; Posted on Monday, May 30, 2005 at 2:03 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Map and Satellite Tiles: This so-called Simple Analysis of Google Map and Satellite Tiles is anything but to my uneducated eyes: it looks at the mechanics of how each 128×128-pixel tile is rendered. Way over my head. Via O’Reilly Radar…. Read more →; 1
Posted on Friday, May 27, 2005 at 11:57 PM
Categories: Online Maps
MSN Virtual Earth: Microsoft’s response to Google Maps comes in the form of MSN Virtual Earth, which was announced yesterday at the D: All Things Digital conference and will debut for real some time this summer. The key feature is the service’s “oblique” perspective — aerial photography from a 45-degree angle — which… Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 at 11:47 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Factory Tour: Google Earth, Map API?: Yesterday’s Google Factory Tour (via Kottke) yielded some interesting tidbits about Google’s operations and future plans, including “Google Earth,” a successor to Keyhole (previous entry) that will debut for real in a couple of weeks. Google Earth is mentioned here and here; it apparently integrates with Google’s search and local… Read more →; Posted on Friday, May 20, 2005 at 12:18 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Chicago Crime Maps: Chicagocrime.org presents crime data from publicly available databases for Chicago. In addition to letting you browse by street, district and so forth, it uses Google Maps — what, couldn’t you see that coming? — to plot crimes on a map of Chicago. Via Scott, whose blog entry on this subject… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at 10:48 PM
Categories: Chicago, Online Maps
Another Google Maps Roundup: More hacks of, and news and commentary about, Google Maps: Hey Google, Map This! Wired’s Daniel Terdiman covers the various Google Maps hacks out there, some of which we’ve seen before here on The Map Room, some of which we haven’t. From that article, two that we haven’t seen before:… Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 at 11:24 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Automating Geotagging: Steeev has come up with some scripts (Firefox and Greasemonkey required) to automate the process of geotagging your Flickr photos for Geobloggers (see previous entry). Via MAKE: Blog…. Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2005 at 11:07 PM
Categories: Geotagging, Online Maps
Toggling Between Maps and Photos: Webmapper considers the ways to toggle between maps and satellite images: with Google Maps it’s just a simple click; they compare that with one of their own projects, as well as Mappy, where “[a] slider widget allows users to change the transparency of the map layer for the aerial photo… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, May 5, 2005 at 6:33 PM
Categories: Online Maps
More Sites About Google Maps: Since its launch a little less than three months ago, Google Maps has generated more buzz than any other mapping site since I’ve been paying attention to them. Adding satellite photos only made it worse. That buzz can be measured by the number of web sites that chronicle Google Maps,… Read more →; 2
Posted on Wednesday, May 4, 2005 at 11:15 PM
Categories: Blogs, Groups & Societies, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Plus Flickr: We’ve seen Google Maps posted to Flickr; now, thanks to a little Google Map hackery and the Flickr API, there’s another Google Maps mashup, Geobloggers, which puts geotagged photos on a Google Maps-generated map. All you need to do is add latitude and longitude tags to your photo, plus a… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, May 3, 2005 at 11:09 PM
Categories: Geotagging, Online Maps
More Google Maps Hacks: When third parties started riffing on Google Maps — whether through hacks or by posting screenshots of its satellite images — I wondered what Google thought about it. After all, the satellite photos are watermarked with copyright notices. I suspect they’re okay with it, though, since the official Google Blog… Read more →; 2
Posted on Friday, April 22, 2005 at 9:37 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps for Britain and Ireland: Google Maps comes to the UK and Ireland. More from the Google Blog. Thanks to Thierry for the catch…. Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, April 19, 2005 at 7:58 PM
Categories: Online Maps
The Beeb on Google Maps: Nothing you haven’t already seen before, but this BBC story briefly covers the recent excitement over the Google Maps satellite stuff, including Memory Maps (see previous entry) and Google Sightseeing (see previous entry)…. Read more →; Posted on Sunday, April 17, 2005 at 7:34 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
A Google Maps Update: I’ve been saving up a bunch of Google Maps satellite imagery links for you over the weekend. Google Maps and Accountability: Dave Shea explores the possibilities of using Google Maps as a tool for whistleblowing rather than a threat to privacy, by posting images of clear-cut logging areas in central… Read more →; Posted on Monday, April 11, 2005 at 12:30 AM
Categories: Blogs, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
More on Google’s Satellite Images: Flickr users have gone nuts with posting screenshots of Google Maps’s new satellite photo feature (see previous entry), if the “map” and “maps” tags are any indication. There’s also a new Flickr group called Memory Maps, the idea of which “is to take a satellite image of your neighborhood from… Read more →; 3
Posted on Wednesday, April 6, 2005 at 4:48 PM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Google Maps Adds Satellite Images: Google Maps has added satellite images to its service as of late Monday, and it’s done so in a really useful manner: one click toggles between maps and satellite photography. Try zooming in without your jaw hitting the floor. The photographs, which aren’t available in all resolutions for all areas,… Read more →; 4
Posted on Tuesday, April 5, 2005 at 1:23 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
Hacking Google Maps: Further to my earlier post, it turns out that there’s already plenty of work under way on hacking Google Maps. Engadget has a how-to on adding your own annotations to Google Maps — it requires Firefox and a plugin, though. This page shows you how to run Google Maps off… Read more →; 3
Posted on Tuesday, March 8, 2005 at 11:09 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps and Web Services: Infoworld’s Jon Udell has a couple of columns (February 18, March 4) pointing out that Google Maps’s open data formats — XML is a wonderful thing — can allow all sorts of web services to be built around it. For example, linking it up with your GPS unit. Via Winer…. Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, March 8, 2005 at 10:32 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps and Safari: Attention Mac users: Google Maps now works with Safari. Via TUAW…. Read more →; 2
Posted on Friday, February 25, 2005 at 9:52 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Online Map of Switzerland: Map.search.ch is an online map of Switzerland; it launched last October. Like Google Maps, it uses the XMLHttpRequest object (a.k.a. “Ajax”) to allow you to zoom and scroll dynamically without reloading the page. Impressive stuff. Via Simon Willison, via Slashdot…. Read more →; 2
Posted on Wednesday, February 23, 2005 at 4:42 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Map Sites: Hints, Tips and Observations: A few random links about map sites this morning. Mapquest hacks, to use or avoid highways or toll routes (via Ask MetaFilter; see also this). In OS X’s Address Book, clicking on the address brings up a contextual menu in which one of the options, “Map Of,” takes you to… Read more →; 2
Posted on Monday, February 21, 2005 at 10:24 AM
Categories: Macintosh, Online Maps
Japanese Rail and Subway Maps: Nicolas Jasson has submitted a frighteningly impressive number of links to Japanese rail and transit maps. His e-mail, which I’ve edited to incorporate links into the text, is as follows: I am very interested in railways and transit and Japanese mapping is usually very accurate and always up-to-date. A few… Read more →; Posted on Sunday, February 13, 2005 at 11:24 PM
Categories: Mass Transit, Online Maps, Railroads, Tokyo
More Google Maps Bits: For those interested in web geekery, Joel Webber looks at the HTML, graphics and XML behind Google Maps. Via Boing Boing. Newsfactor’s Business Report has a short article on Google Maps that looks at it from, naturally, the business angle, i.e., how Google can monetize maps. I originally posted this… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, February 9, 2005 at 9:21 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps’s MapPoint Moment: Google Maps is on crack, uploaded by gillicious. It was only a matter of time before Google Maps (see previous entry) spat out some crazy, non-linear directions for getting from point A to B like the well-publicized Norwegian MapPoint incident last month. While not as spectacular, Flickr user Gillian… Read more →; 4
Posted on Wednesday, February 9, 2005 at 5:21 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Google Maps: Stop the presses! Google Maps has just been launched. (Via MetaFilter.) First impressions. This is frigging amazing, with smooth scrolling and zooming: you’re not constantly reloading pages like in MapQuest. Huge mapping surface. And drop shadows. No Safari support yet, but it’s coming. I’m impressed by the detail. They’ve got… Read more →; 14
Posted on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 at 1:29 AM
Categories: Online Maps
Megan’s Law Maps: California’s Megan’s Law web site uses maps to list registered sex offenders. After clicking through the disclaimer, the user selects a county, which brings up a map on which each dot represents a registered offender. Clicking on one of the dots brings up the offender’s details, including the address and… Read more →; 1
Posted on Tuesday, February 1, 2005 at 8:08 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Where Do You Want to Go Today?: A bug in Microsoft’s MapPoint software makes a trip from Haugesund to Trondheim, Norway, look like an episode from The Amazing Race: it recommends a circuitous, 2,700-kilometre route through the U.K., Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Hilarity ensues, because Microsoft Schadenfreude is the very best kind. Microsoft blogger Robert… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, January 27, 2005 at 10:41 AM
Categories: Online Maps
OpenStreetMap: OpenStreetMap “is an effort to produce free (CC-licensed) streetmaps of the world.” It’s in “pre-pre-pre alpha” at the moment. The idea is to get free data by running around with a GPS, analysis of aerial photography or other methods since map data is expensive in Europe and elsewhere. We are… Read more →; Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 10:41 AM
Categories: Copyright, GIS, GPS, Online Maps
Fun with Flickr; Mappr: A little more about Flickr, which I wrote about in October (Flickr Users’ Map Photos). Some users tag their map pictures with “maps”, others with “map”; see them both here. You can get RSS and Atom feeds for either tag, but not for both at once — that would be… Read more →; 3
Posted on Sunday, January 16, 2005 at 10:18 AM
Categories: Online Maps
DIY Map: John Emerson has been working on something cool. He writes, DIY Map is a clickable, zooming map written in Flash and colored by data from an external text file. The external data file makes it easy to customize and update, and to use the same Flash file many times in… Read more →; 1
Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2005 at 9:46 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Generating GIS with PHP: Image_GIS is a PHP package that allows you to generate on-the-fly maps in PNG or JPEG image formats from geographical datasets. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means: essentially it means you can transform raw GIS data into a map in a web-ready format. (Thanks again, Huw.)… Read more →; Posted on Tuesday, March 9, 2004 at 9:53 AM
Categories: GIS, Online Maps, Software
Visited States and Countries: Making the rounds in the weblog world is a tool from World66 that lets you generate a map of U.S. states you’ve visited. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s eerily akin to the map of visited countries I mentioned last month. In fact, it’s by the same developer —… Read more →; Posted on Thursday, February 5, 2004 at 12:53 PM
Categories: Online Maps
Visited Countries, Land Geist: Thomas sends a link to Visited Countries, which generates an on-the-fly GIF of a world map showing the countries you have visited. A little mucking about Douwe Osinga’s web site reveals a whole stack of similar web-based projects, including Land Geist, which maps keywords to countries by showing how often… Read more →; Posted on Monday, January 19, 2004 at 7:45 AM
Categories: Online Maps

Note: Entries from 2003 were not categorized and will not appear in the category archives. Please consult the monthly archives.

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