Maps, especially online have always been restrictive in what you can do with them due to copyright etc. But there has been an international movement dedicated to providing unrestricted alternatives and as you can see, this map of my part of London is pretty good. I’ve put a blue rectangle around the area in the top map which the bottom map shows.
Like Google Maps you can zoom in and out and drag the map. No satellite data of course!
Not all streets are currently labelled- mine isn’t, but I could sign up and add it in. As more and more people sign up this becomes more and more valuable. One danger is of course that people will be lazy and copy data from commercial or copyright maps and that could be a problem. It’s not unknown for cartographers to introduce fake streets etc to try and spot when people copy their work.
So if you have a spare moment or two, why not help this map by signing up (no costs) and adding your local information.
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Popularity: 16% [?]
This shows just how useful the web can be, showing as it does where the fires are raging in California, where evacuation centers are located, what has been evacuated, where volunteers are needed, red cross centers and what’s closed etc. It is periodically updated from Twitter.
Popularity: 14% [?]
The title makes it sound like some sort of website for detecting animal droppings! This is a new BBC website for the TV series Earth which will be appearing soon.
The tracking part of the website follows migratory paths of penguins, polar bears, whales etc. This will be particularly invaluable for hunters everywhere (joke!). As you’d expect from the BBC the production values are high with gorgeous photos, though the flash animation about the series crashed my browser - I suspect you need a fast connection to get the most out of this site.
So if you’re in to animals, highly recommended. But if you aren’t or you think the BBC Licence is too high…
Popularity: 12% [?]
A recent phenomena has been instant blogging with Twitter being the main name in this field. People post single messages which pop up on a google map. Personally I’m not too impressed by it- the signal to noise ratio is too low and it comes and goes in a very ephemeral way- there’s little content.
Slightly more interesting is this site Flickrvision which does the same but with photos posted from flickr.com. At the moment the main 2d Google maps view doesn’t seem to work too well but it has a 3D rotating Earth interface which is pretty neat. But ultimately it is something to look at and then move on. Still, as a show case of Web 2.0 with mashups of Flickr and Google Maps/3D world it’s interesting.
Popularity: 13% [?]
The best way to describe Flash Earth is to place it mid way between Google Maps and Google Earth. It can draw data from Google, Yahoo, Ask, Nasa, Open layers or Microsoft but the views are satelite view so you see an aerial view rather than a map. What you can do with it is smoothly zoom in and out and rotate.
It’s perhaps more of a toy than a serious mapping website but I’m not denigrating it. It’s fascinating to look at something and then compare it with the alternative from various providers. One of them (Microsoft) has street names, so you get a Google Maps type hybrid view. What you can’t do of course with Google Maps is smoothly rotate the view- Flash Earth is very good and very quick at doing that.
It also has a decent search, which works with UK postcodes as well. Take a look at the postcode SW6 1TR. It’s where I work; the Empress State building near Earls Court (in fact next door to the exhibition centre). The google photo is maybe 1-2 years old but the Microsoft one shows it being refurbished about 5 years ago (it cost £90 million!) so the view looks like a building site!
Popularity: 9% [?]
I’m not sure if this site is still being updated as it has 2005, 2006 copyright dates but it has a fair amount of stuff on it so worth while for that.
It shows the locations (on Google Maps) where some films (that’s movies for US readers!) and TV shows were made. I’ve been watching Prison Break a lot, so as it is filmed in a real prison (Joliet Prison in Illinois according to the website), I thought’d I’d use it as the screen dump. If you haven’t seen the TV show, don’t miss it, it’s excellent.
Popularity: 10% [?]
It’s not often that I praise TFL for anything- their anti-car policies slow down traffic deliberately, but I was surprised to see them combining traffic web cam shots with Google Maps in a mash-up.
The linked web page shows some 60 or so camera- though not all are active- certainly Stratford wasn’t when I looked, stretching from Richmond in the West to Dartford in the East. Click on any map marker and you get a pop up with the most recent traffic web cam.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Craigslist.org is a very well known free listings website. The linked site took student rentals data from craigslist and has plotted a heat map using Google maps to show which areas are the busiest. You can also see average rent per room
The dataset is over 120,000 points and there are some charts showing off some of it’s characteristics. If you have Firefox you can also see the average number of listings on a block by block basis- that’s quite a nifty overlay. (Shown below)
Popularity: 10% [?]
I love this- not only can you get a route from a to b, but if you decide you want to visit places c or d along the route, you can drag the route line, and it recalculates the directions and distances.
I entered Watford and Watford Gap and then dragged the route out to a somewhat more meandering route as you can see.
The bug- well click find directions and enter Watford and Watford gap. It should say 60.6 miles. Now click the Get Reverse Directions link and it’s suddenly 67.6 miles! Seven extra miles, yet it looks the same on the map? That’s only a minor bug, this is still terrific technology.
Popularity: 9% [?]
There are a lot of cyclists in the world and many use the same routes and paths. Bikely is free and lets you share bicycle routes. It uses google maps to show the route and you can see step by step each of the path changes. Routes can be short, a few km or long, over several hundred and the database contains over 21,000 routes from many countries in the world.
Some routes have pop up instructions at each point along the route- the detail is what you put in. If you’re a cyclist, this is one site that is highly recommended.
Popularity: 8% [?]
This is pretty. It’s a selection of highlighted locations from Google Maps that can be set as your PC’s wallpaper. You can choose one of five sizes from 1023 x 768 to 1,920 x 1.200. If you see somewhere interesting looking then send it in as a suggestion.
There are currently 29 places- you can see the squares at the top of the screen, just click to select. The picture highlighted shows fields from Kazakhstan.
Popularity: 9% [?]
I have over 300 digital photos on flickr.com. A day or two ago they introduced geotagging, allowing you to locate your photos in the world. Eventually, Ie within a week or two there will be millions of photos of nearly every spot on earth. Or at least the interesting spots.
In the first 24 hours after they added geotagging, over 1 and a quarter million photos were geotagged. Now there’s a bit of a gimmicky aspect to this, so I can’t imagine this level of geotagging will be sustainable for more than a week or two but never mind. I’ve geotagged five of my photos. The picture shows a couple located on the flickr.com map. One is in Windermere, the other of Blackpool tower. The link goes to Flickr, if you want to see my photos (you do???) search for homeparking on flickr.
Popularity: 11% [?]