The Map Room

Another Street View update, which Google is calling “our biggest update yet” — no new countries, it seems, but “[n]ew imagery is now available for 13 of our established Street View countries: Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Romania, South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.”

One of the more unique interactive city maps I have seen to date is the Reykjavík Center Map, an online map of Iceland’s capital. Yes, it’s a pushpin map, but it uses an isometric projection (which I’ve seen in some Chinese maps) and the base map is a veritable work of art — it’s not at all computer generated, and it looks like a watercolour. Snorri Þór Tryggvason, who worked on the map with some friends and sent me the link, wrote, “The mapmaking took two years and over 3,000 hours to complete,” and I believe him.

Speaking of China, Reuters and ZDNet (among others) report that Google has applied for a licence to continue to operate Google Maps in China. Drip, drip. Via @geospatialnews and @ogleearth.

Previously: An Update on Google Maps in China.

Update: Ogle Earth makes things more clear.

Google continues to replace mapping data from other providers like TomTom (Tele Atlas) with its own data pulled together from multiple services. Most recently it was the turn of France, Monaco and Luxembourg, whose TomTom-derived map has been replaced by data coming in part from the IGN, complete with the “Report a Problem” link. (Google’s made this switch in the U.S., Canada and, last fall, 10 other countries). Via All Points Blog.

The Albany Times-Union has a story about local map publisher Jimapco. They’ve recently moved into online maps, launching their Map Room website (no relation). “Map Room features colorful, interactive maps of Capital Region features from tax rates to golfing and goes beyond the Round Lake map-making company’s old strategy of creating static, customized maps for online use.”

Esri’s Storytelling with Maps competition invites entrants to “[t]ell us your story and submit your best web map or mobile app that informs, educates, and engages the audience about a topic or event”; the map or app must have been…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The MapQuest Blog notes — belatedly, I think — that MapQuest has reached its 15th anniversary. Previously: MapQuest at 10….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google announced today that Map Maker is now available for the United States; the tool that allows users to add contributions to Google Maps had, I thought, been targeted at countries where Google lacked map data, but it appears that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that there are two OpenStreetMap manuals out there — the one by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton, the other by Jonathan Bennett — each of which, confusingly, is titled OpenStreetMap. Muki…  •  Continue reading this entry.

While I continue to procrastinate my own review of the book, here’s another review, by Dan Karran, of OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton. Dan calls it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oliver O’Brien reviews OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton. “The book succeeds in simultaneously being OpenStreetMap for Dummies, OpenStreetMap: The Missing Manual and the O’Reilly OpenStreetMap book…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The news earlier this month that MapQuest had added Canada (among other countries) to its suite of Open MapQuest sites — was something I’d been dreading for some time. I’ve been making contributions to OpenStreetMap’s Canadian maps for a year,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of recent announcements from MapQuest: walking and transit directions for the desktop/web version (playing catchup here — Google added walking directions in 2008, Bing in 2010 — but playing catchup is better than not playing at all) and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last week, the British government launched an online crime map that offered street-level crime statistics. The website promptly crashed from the onslaught of visitors, which hit 18 million per hour at one point. News coverage: BBC News, The Guardian; The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Follow Your World is a notification service for Google Earth/Google Maps satellite and aerial imagery updates: you can register a location with the service and, if that location gets fresh imagery, it sends you an e-mail alert. Requires a Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two items of note in this article from the China Daily: first, that China’s official online mapping service, Map World, is now out of beta (I wasn’t aware that it was in beta in the first place); and second, that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has announced updated or new 45-degree aerial imagery — accessed through the satellite layer in Google Maps — for 10 U.S. cities, and promises that more cities are to come. Previously: Google’s Oblique Imagery Graduates; Bing, Google and MapQuest…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another review of the English edition of the OpenStreetMap manual by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton — OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World — by Directions Magazine’s Adena Schutzberg. Previously: Two Book Reviews….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Popular Science pivots from the recent Nicaragua-Costa Rica border dispute to make a point about how digital maps are essentially commercial — rather than governmental or “official” cartography: “The incident raises some interesting issues concerning the future of mapmaking that,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

New to Google Street View: street-level imagery from Romania. Vampire jokes ensue. More at Google Maps Mania….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last month, it was announced that OpenStreetMap would be getting its hands on Microsoft’s aerial imagery. (One way to make maps in OSM is to draw on top of aerial imagery. Yahoo’s imagery has been made available for that purpose,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at why OpenStreetMap has been getting attention (and resources) from two large, and very commercial, mapping providers: Bing (Microsoft) and MapQuest (AOL). “For Microsoft and AOL’s MapQuest unit, OpenStreetMap presents an opportunity to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s been talked about in the Canadian media for some time now, but, as Google LatLong reported yesterday, Google Maps’s bicycling layer for Canadian cities — Calgary, Edmonton, Kelowna, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, Ottawa-Gatineau (including a bike trail out in my…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MapQuest’s new tool allowing people to save and share their own personal maps is called My Maps. The MapQuest Blog introduces the feature. Are they absolutely sure that name is a good idea … ?…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google’s limited coverage of Germany in Street View, which rolled out earlier this month in a few public areas and a single village, has now expanded to 20 cities; Google Earth Blog has a list. Previously: Street View’s Limited Rollout…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google’s switch to its own map data, compiled from various sources, for the United States and Canada has not been without its problems, but this week the company has made the switch in 10 more countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a profile of Bing Maps architect Blaise Agüera y Arcas that focuses less on the horse-race aspects of Bing’s competition with the Google and more on Agüera’s idiosyncratic creative methodology. Interesting….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bing Maps updates announced earlier this week: bird’s-eye aerial views will soon be available without requiring a Silverlight plugin, and the current 3D maps control will be removed….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google’s Street View has launched in just a few locations in Germany, including sports facilities, public areas, and the village of Oberstaufen, which baked Google a cake. Google Earth Blog, Google Maps Mania….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ogle Earth reports on the future of Google Maps in China: “In short, things are still not looking up for Google. Sina’s article references government sources who state that Google will definitely not get its license by the end of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Daily Mail says that Google has been denied access to the Ordnance Survey’s MasterMap and U.K. local authorities’ guides due to terms in Google’s licence. Google’s competitors don’t have such licensing terms, and the guides are available there, apparently….  •  Continue reading this entry.

China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping unleashed its own online mapping service Thursday. Map World is presumably kosher insofar as Chinese mapping restrictions are concerned. It has both maps and satellite/aerial imagery, though the map’s design is rather ugly…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Justin O’Bierne’s critiques of OpenStreetMap’s base map of North America — essentially, the first thing first-time visitors to OSM would encounter: the Mapnik layer — has apparently been stirring up a bit of controversy in the OSM community. Part one…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’ve been messing around with OpenStreetMap, like I have, you’re probably familiar with Potlatch, its web-based map editor. There’s now a new version, called Potlatch 2, that’s currently under development. If you’re brave enough, you can play with the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A printed world atlas is more than a bound collection of relief maps; among the additional materials usually found in a world atlas is a section that the Oxford series calls a “Gazeteer of Nations” and the National Geographic atlas…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In one of those kinda-superficial tech-journalism articles that assigns scores to competing products and services, PC World’s Christopher Null asks, Which Online Mapping Service Is Best? Null compares Google, Bing, and MapQuest, in six categories — how well, Null says,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

When Google replaced map data from Tele Atlas with its own map data from a mix of sources (for the U.S. last October and for Canada last April), new errors proliferated. In some cases the wrong labels were applied —…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Street View expanded again today, adding Brazil, Ireland and even a spot in Antarctica (Google Earth Blog, Google LatLong, Google Maps Mania, the Guardian). Meanwhile, Germany remains one country where Street View is not to be found, even though…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MapQuest Open — the variant of MapQuest launched in July that uses OpenStreetMap data — has expanded to four more countries: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. I hope that reflects a certain level of quality of the OSM maps in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Dominion Post of Wellington, New Zealand talks with Google Maps designer Patrick Hoffman about the challenges in designing map symbols — for things like churches and hospitals — for the online mapping site. Via GIS Lounge….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Read The Washington Monthly’s article on the troubles Google has encountered when presenting disputed names and boundaries in Google Earth and Google Maps. The problem, it seems, is that governments and people protesting various boundary and name disputes (Arunachal Pradesh…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yes, it’s a small thing (pun intended), but short URLs for Google Maps links is both handy and overdue — and a feature that OpenStreetMap actually had first….  •  Continue reading this entry.

In an interesting development, MapQuest has launched a site that combines OpenStreetMap mapping data with its user interface and routing directions. MapQuest Open is limited to the U.K. for the time being (a wise decision considering the state of OSM…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google’s bird’s-eye oblique imagery has graduated from the API and Google Maps Labs to a spot on the main Google Maps page, at least for a few locations (a couple in Europe and a bunch in South Africa and the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MapQuest has announced a major new redesign of its website, which now includes a single search box (rather than multiple address fields), other interface and feature enhancements, and hooks to social networking sites and other AOL properties. There’s also…  •  Continue reading this entry.

With the World Cup as its backdrop, Google has launched Street View in South Africa….  •  Continue reading this entry.

OpenStreetMap gets a writeup on Ars Technica that serves as a pretty good summary for the project. Via OpenGeoData. Previously: Washington Post on OpenStreetMap….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Engadget reports Nokia and Yahoo have announced a strategic partnership that includes Yahoo using Nokia’s NAVTEQ for maps and navigation. Of the major online map providers, it’s safe to say that Yahoo has been lagging the furthest behind. Engadget quotes…  •  Continue reading this entry.

TechFlash: “Google is hiring an army of 300 temporary workers in Kirkland as part of a yearlong campaign to improve the accuracy of Google Maps. … The workers will be part of a one-year initiative to correct mistakes in Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps is using new map data in Canada, abandoning the Tele Atlas data with which I had so many problems in September 2008. According to Google, “In Canada, we’ve made use of data from organizations such as the National…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nearly two years after releasing a browser plugin allowing Google Maps API developers to embed Google Earth into a web page, Google has integrated “Earth view” into the Google Maps site itself: “Earth” is now a tab beside “Map” and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps announces driving directions for 111 new countries, largely in Africa, central Asia, Central and South America, and island countries around the world (from Aruba to Vanuatu)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A 3D mode for Google Street View, requiring 3D glasses, turned up yesterday, which made me wonder whether it was a time-limited April Fool’s gag, but it’s April 2 and it’s still there. Moreover, the mode actually works. Jennifer found…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yesterday, Google announced draggable public transit directions; the day before, Bing Maps announced walking directions and a number of other features….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Considering how small some of the towns are that are already covered in Street View, I would have thought that there wasn’t much left for Google to do. Apparently I’m wrong. Windsor will be redone because its images were taken…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The MapQuest Blog touts the features of MapQuest’s mobile-optimized website, available without having to download a standalone app (which is, to be sure, still available). “Now more people can get a modern look-and-feel, a friendlier user-experience and new features…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An interview with Google engineer Scott Shawcroft about Google Maps’s new bike directions; the audio is about five minutes long….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Post finds fault with Google Maps’s bike directions in New York City. The feature, the Post says, “is filled with potentially fatal flaws, including routes that cut across Central Park’s treacherous tranverse roads and steer cyclists to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Along with the British updates I mentioned last night, Street View has also arrived in Hong Kong and Macau, Google Maps Mania reports. (I’d be very interested to see whether Street View comes to the Chinese mainland. But I wouldn’t…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps has added bicycle directions, which take into account such things as bike trails and dedicated bike lanes (take when possible), as well as steep uphill slopes and busy thoroughfares (avoid!). It’s explained in some detail on the Official…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Street View’s coverage of the U.K. is about to expand dramatically. As of Thursday, practically every road in Britain will be included — a total of 238,000 miles (380,000 kilometres). That brings it up to the level found in some…  •  Continue reading this entry.

CNet reports that the European Union’s privacy watchdog sent a letter to Google outlining its concerns about Street View; in the letter, the watchdog “told Google that it should warn towns and cities before it snaps photos for its online…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jay Montano goes on and on about how much he loves Nokia’s Ovi Maps on his N97, now that it’s been updated to version 3.03….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via multiple sources, Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s TED talk demonstrating some of the more amazing, augmented-reality features in Bing Maps….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s Google’s Lalitesh Katragadda, speaking at TEDIndia 2009 about the impact of Google’s Map Maker on that part of the world that is not adequately mapped, particularly with respect to natural disasters. Thanks to Richard for the link….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has added Labs to Google Maps; Google has used the Labs category to offer some quirky, optional and experimental features to its established products (when Beta isn’t enough, I guess). In the case of Google Maps, that means some…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Geotagged Flickr photos are now available via Bing Maps and Street View, and Rev Dan Catt, late of Flickr, bemoans the fact that that while Google and Microsoft had to use the API, “Yahoo, who has direct access to all…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Colby Cosh’s reaction to the discovery that his home town — Bon Accord, Alberta: population 1,534 — is now in Google Street View: [W]hat I felt was more like roller-coaster horror/panic. My memories of Bon Accord are pretty much all…  •  Continue reading this entry.

For the rest of you, the news is straightforward: Google Street View has added imagery from Norway and Finland, and has dramatically expanded its coverage of Canada, including more than 130 cities and major highways; it’s also added ski runs…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kottke notices that New York City’s mapping portal has aerial photos of the city from 1924. Deroy Peraza has some fun comparing them to aerial photos from the present day. Previously: NYCityMap….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Washington Post’s article about OpenStreetMaps’s “citizen cartographers” portrays it as the efforts of what I guess could be called lovingly obsessive locals who care more about getting it right than “a couple of guys driving a truck down a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

All the attention OpenStreetMap has been receiving of late with respect to the Haitian earthquake prodded me to stop procrastinating, sign up for an account there, and poke around with it a bit. In what I think was a wise…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A series of maps based on satellite imagery, including maps of damaged building density and oil spillage, from SERTIT. In English and French. Via Dave Smith. Gaia GPS has released a free iPhone app that is intended to help disaster…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Silverlight version of Bing Maps is out of beta, and will become the default over time; those averse to installing Silverlight can still use the default AJAX version. Previously: Bing, Google and MapQuest Add Each Other’s Features….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps Mania reports that Street View imagery is now available in Sweden and Denmark, as well as National Trust properties in the United Kingdom. Update: Google’s announcement; Italy, Taiwan and the U.S. got Street View updates as well….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bing Maps has added Streetside imagery for Vancouver (well, some of it) and Whistler in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics. See also Mapperz. Previously: Bing, Google and MapQuest Add Each Other’s Features….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Chicago Tribune article notes the appearance on Google Maps of obsolete Chicago neighbourhood, street and building names — names that haven’t been used for decades — and landmarks that have long since disappeared. Map designer Dennis McClendon, who was…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new beta version of Bing Maps was announced last week; it uses Silverlight, which requires an additional download, but, unlike ActiveX, at least it’s cross-platform. One notable new feature is street-level imagery, which they’re branding as Streetside. Meanwhile, if…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google explains “the principles we follow in designing our mapping products, particularly as they apply to disputed regions” — e.g., when two countries disagree about what a body of water is named or where a boundary is disputed. “That can…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This morning I notice, thanks to a tip by mapperz, that a number of additional Canadian cities have been added to Street View: Edmonton, Hamilton, London (Ontario), Saskatoon, St. John’s, Sudbury, Winnipeg, Victoria. The cities surrounding Toronto are also in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps’s Tips for Life page is a bit too preciously titled — it’s more a collection of tips on how to use Google Maps, based on four user profiles (local search, global browsing, navigation, business listings). More thorough than…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Times looks at user contributions to online maps, starting with Google, with its Map Maker program covering 140 countries and its recent opening of its U.S. maps. “People have been contributing information to digital maps for some…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Swiss federal data protection commissioner is taking Google to court. Hanspeter Thür argues that Google’s blurring of faces and licence plates in its Street View imagery of Switzerland is insufficient and that Google has not complied with his recommendations,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I should have waited: this Google LatLong post summarizes all the Street View updates: not only Hawaii and Mexico, but also Spain and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Latitude has added a couple of features: history and alerts. Not to disrespect the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In addition to Mexico, Street View has also come to Hawaii….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Mexican version of Google Maps has launched; here’s Google’s announcement from last Friday (in Spanish). As Google Maps Mania also notes, Street View imagery has been added for seven cities in Mexico; that was supposed to have launched today,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Peter Batty weighs in on the quality of Google’s new, homegrown map data: As anyone in the geo world knows, all maps have errors, and it’s hard to do a really rigorous analysis on Google’s current dataset versus others. But…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Steven Citron-Pousty wonders whether Google dropped Tele Atlas before their own data was ready. “Google’s routing data sucks right now and there are no two ways about it.” Via Peter. Previously: Google Stops Using Tele Atlas in the U.S….  •  Continue reading this entry.

MapQuest has improved the look of its maps — and to my eyes, at least, it certainly is an improvement. Meanwhile, Adam DuVander is impressed with MapQuest’s developer tools: “It’s now a platform worth considering, right along with Google and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google announced Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 today — turn-by-turn navigation for Google Maps running on Android smartphones, using the phones’ Internet connection to fetch up-to-date map, direction and traffic data. Also satellite imagery and Street View. Also, it’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google is soliciting locations (i.e., trails, campuses, malls and so forth) in the U.S. to send its Street View tricycle; suggestions can be submitted here. A previous solicitation in the U.K. (which I saw but did not blog) received…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Argentina had been conspicuous by its absence from Google Maps (most other South American countries had at least some mapping data; Argentina was white space surrounded by maps), but no longer: Google Maps Argentina launched (in beta, of course) earlier…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In the wake of Street View’s Canadian launch, an Ottawa home security expert argues that Google Street View will be a valuable tool for burglars. Not that burglars couldn’t drive up and down the street looking for easy marks prior…  •  Continue reading this entry.

All Points Blog reports that Google is no longer using Tele Atlas data for the United States (they’re using their own map data instead); GPS Review has more to say. I can say that the maps are unchanged in Canada…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps adds error reporting — clicking on “report a problem” at the bottom right of the map opens a dialogue where you can place a pushpin and describe the problem. “Once we’ve received your edit or suggestion we’ll confirm…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google’s Street View has launched in 11 Canadian cities: Calgary, Kitchener and Waterloo, Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, Québec, Toronto, Vancouver, and Squamish and Whistler (these last two almost certainly for the upcoming Olympics). Equally large cities like Edmonton, London (Ontario),…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Western Illinois University librarian Linda Zellmer has compiled a list of state online atlases of various sorts, from online GIS to Google Maps mashups, and from general atlases to those limited to specific topics. Via MAPS-L….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Something must have gotten into the drinking water, because OpenStreetMap is getting all kinds of press lately, where it’s portrayed as a no-cost alternative to more costly map data. Dan Sung has an interview with OSM founder Steve Coast that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Guardian checks in on what OpenStreetMap has been up to lately. Via OpenGeoData….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bing Maps’s Canadian front page is being mistaken for a tourism promotion, The Globe and Mail reports. With the heading of “Explore Canada,” it is a bit confusing — until you realize that the top link is for the Alberta…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Some reviews of mapping applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Peter reviews OffMaps, a $2 app (for the moment) that not only uses OpenStreetMap data, but also allows you to download the map data locally (handy if you’re…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Reported everywhere: Google’s Street View adds 25 cities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands; here’s a brief Grauniad article….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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]…  •  Continue reading this entry.

No new data, but Yahoo announced some upgrades to Yahoo Maps’s interface and international support (languages, kilometres-vs.-miles) yesterday….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On Google Maps Mania, Keir Clarke summarizes the year in Google Maps. (Oddly enough, more things have already occcurred since then.)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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.,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Speaking of which, the Virtual Earth evangelist blog also reports on 14.3 terabytes of new imagery for Virtual Earth….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yahoo announces upgraded real-time traffic coverage: more cities, more detail, more roads….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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?…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Times has the 10 most bizarre sights in Google Street View; Valleywag has the pictures….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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),…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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.)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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 […]…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Europe, at least, “now has roads, and rivers and normal map stuff like that” in Yahoo! Maps, Rev Dan Catt reports….  •  Continue reading this entry.

In other Virtual Earth news, a localized version for Japan was also launched yesterday, replete with geocoding, yellow pages, road maps and satellite imagery….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Amazon’s A9 search engine has discontinued its street-level imagery and maps. Via All Points Blog. See previous entry: A9 Adds Maps….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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?…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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.,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Boston Globe’s Peter Howe has a story on the Google Maps API release (see previous entry), with a quote from yours truly….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps comes to the UK and Ireland. More from the Google Blog. Thanks to Thierry for the catch….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Attention Mac users: Google Maps now works with Safari. Via TUAW….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.