Webware posts advance info about Earthmine, a street-view urban imagery system similar to Google Street View, but with some advanced features. Earthmine uses still photography instead of video, so the image quality is supposedly higher than that of Google Street View. More interestingly, they’re combining the image data with laser range finding to both correct perspective views and provide location data for the objects in the photos. Privacy concerns will be addressed by automatic blurring of features like faces and license plates. The mapping service will be sold commercially, but a consumer-friendly portal will supposedly launch later this summer. Other street view services linked to in the article are Microsoft’s Live Search Maps , EveryScape, and HopStop .
Addendum: According to Download Squad, you’ll also be able to tag and label objects in the view.
If you visit the Google Maps Developer Preview page, and click on the “Browse Content” button or “Add Content” link, it will take you to a multi-page listing of dozens of currently-available Mapplets; keep clicking on the “more” link at the upper right to take you to the next page. Click on an “Add it to Maps” button below an Mapplet, and it will be added to your Mapplets bookmarks.
Michael Kosowsky, one of the creators of the “Hey What’s That” site (for panoramas, viewsheds and peak identification in Google Maps and Google Earth) has sent out an email with some news:
- He gave a talk at Google about his website in early May, which you can view at Google Video
- Contour mapping at Hey What’s That, which was spotty before, is now improved; contours should be visible at every zoom level.
The classic functionality for Google Maps is the computerized equivalent of “sticking a pin in a map”, albeit a very fancy pin with the ability to hold and display additional information. ZeeMaps takes that simple Google Maps functionality and moves it towards something a lot closer to a Geographic Information System. With ZeeMaps you can:
- Create standard maps, housing maps (specialized real estate data attributes), or IP maps (data markers based on location of IP address)
- Import and export data in CSV format.
- Import a list of addresses and have them automatically geocoded and plotted. Or, import data with latitude/longitude coordinates.
- Define attribute fields for your data, then filter your data based on those attributes.
- Annotate the map with text (separate from the data markers).
- Display data in map form, list form, or both.
- Select data points based on distance from a specific point (spatial selection).
- Publish maps on the Web, either in read-only format, or allowing others to add and modify points. You can also select subsets of data that is displayed, while hiding other datasets.
- Associate and upload pictures and audio files with data markers.
- “Print” the map in PDF format.
The service is free, and can be used without registration (though registration makes tracking and managing multiple maps easier). The interface is intuitive, and there’s a decent help section. Although some operations take a few more steps to accomplish than I would like, overall there’s nothing major to complain about; it’s a great Google Maps service, especially at the price.
Simple Spark has a searchable inventory of Web 2.0 apps, with the ability to bookmark them on-site with a free account. Enter “maps” as the search term, and 147 sites pop up, many of which I hadn’t heard of before (GPS currently only yields 4; GIS, 2).
Via Download Squad.
The Yahoo Pipes blog nominally has some examples of how to use Pipes to plot geographically-coded data in the Yahoo Maps interface using JSON and RSS (though they don’t seem to be working for me now).
Via Slashgeo.
There are hundreds of Web 2.0 sites out there, and while many are potentially interesting and useful, finding the right one can be a pain. TechCrunch has a post this morning about Go2Web20.net, a site devoted to tracking and tagging Web 2.0 sites. Its Flash interface (occasionally flaky) lets you search for a Web 2.0 site by keyword, or by using a tag cloud.
What’s the geographical connection? They have tags for “Mapping” and “GPS”. But it’s worth poking around just to see what’s out there and available – I especially recommend looking at the “Collaboration” tag for interesting ways to work cooperatively on projects over the Internet.
