Gadgetopia

According to Google Sightseeing, Google Maps has made some significant improvements. Today Google quietly updated its map service to add high-resolution aerial photography for much more of the globe than the previous limited coverage of North America. New additions include Scotland, Iceland, Kuwait and many, many more. Cool! Now even ...

Google Maps now integrates with Wikipedia and Panaramio. You can see related Wikipedia articles and images from any spot on the map by clicking the More tab.

Google tinkerers make data come alive: CNN has an article on what people are doing with Google maps. Tracking sexual predators in Florida. Guiding travelers to the cheapest gas nationwide. Pinpointing $1,500 studio apartments for rent in Manhattan. Geeks, tinkerers and innovators are crashing the Google party, having discovered how ...

Google Maps: This is the smoothest map interface I've ever seen, and it found my house, tucked away in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. View the source on that baby. Someone tells me how it works. Doesn't seem to be Flash, but I didn't have the patience to dig through it ...

Google Maps has now added an option to display your map with sattelite data. If you ever wondered what Gadgetopia World Headquarters looks like from space, now's your chance. Of course, the defenses are masked from sattelites, and most of the facility is subterreanean, but you get the idea. Via ...

Google GlobeTrotting: Home: Great site full of Google Maps of famous places, like Bill Gates's house and an Atlanta airport with a half dozen planes coming for a landing or just taking off when the picture was taken (look for the shadows). Why does it feel like Google Maps with ...

AJAX Powered IP Location Lookup: Type in an IP and get a Google Map of where it's located. I tried it with one IP I knew off the top of my head, and it seemed accurate. Someone else try it too, and report on the results. Via Scott Small.

One of the things about Google Maps that I never cared for was that the route it gives you when you ask directions isn t always the route I want to go. So I d usually use it along with a couple of other resources to plan a trip. I just discovered ...

Google turns 9 today Happy Birthday! (it just so happens to be my birthday as well, but that s slightly less notable.) We write a lot about Google here (as do lots of others), and I think it s a rare day that I don t touch something associated with Google. But, I m ...

Gmaps Pedometer: Apps like this are a constant reminder that I suck. They're devastating to my self-esteem. I could ramble on about how cool this is, but let me just say that by opening up an API to your data, you open the whole world to it. And -- even ...

Those geniuses at Google are at it again, now providing satellite photos of the areas of New Orleans, LA, that were hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. If you do a Google Maps search for New Orleans, LA, you'll get the map of the city with an extra red button, labeled ...

Google local business ads (Beta): This is new today. Whenever a user enters a query that matches advertisers' chosen keywords and business information, up to three local business ads may appear as "Sponsored Links" below the user's Google Local search results. The ads display in two parts: a highlighted listing ...

Brewster Jennings Protects America: The Google Map Hunt Game: This game makes me feel good to be alive. I played it on the "easy" and "short" settings, and still just barely completed it before the time came up. You have to (1) know your trivia, and (2) be really proficient ...

GWT is Open-Sourced: This is cool, but I had no idea the GWT was that complicated. The Google Web Toolkit has been open-sourced. The toolkit was developed internally and can be used to create products like GMail and Google Maps. It allows you to program in Java and let the ...

How Google Earth Ate Our Town: Interesting story about how Nanaimo, British Columbia has become a huge testbed for Google Earth. The city is giving Google reams of data, and Google is exposing that in Google Earth. The city s planning department has, over the past five years, steadily fed Google ...

Google Mars This map of Mars, published by Percival Lowell in 1895, was the result of many years spent carefully studying the Red Planet through his telescope. Now you can do the same through your web browser. In collaboration with NASA researchers at Arizona State University, we've created some of ...

Yahoo! Maps, Driving Directions, and Traffic: Yahoo! has released a new version of their mapping service. It's done in Flash, which is nice. A bit smoother than the DHTML version over at Google, but no satellite images. If you want directions and you enter a destination address, it pops up ...

Hybrid map that is. Maybe this isn't such a new thing, but I just noticed today that Google Maps has a new Hybrid mode. In Hybrid mode, all of the labeled items from the map view are superimposed over the satellite image. Slashdot has a post on it from two ...

I was browsing through Google Video last night (that's where the Duron post came from), and I got to thinking that there's so much good stuff in there, but there's a bunch of crap too. And none of it is really organized beyond the general search that comes with it. ...

Google Maps give you handy directions from New York to Dublin. Step #23 is a little tricky, though. Via Kottke.

Here's another great use of Google Maps -- Storm Report Map. Our local meteorologist pointed this out last night. It overlays a Google Map with weather report data after storms strike. A quick look at June 20th shows that Gadgetopia World Headquarters was right in the middle of a whole ...

Wayfaring Map - Jacktracker: A Google maps hack to show exactly where secret agent Jack Bauer is at every moment of his latest 24 hour adventure.

... And Not In The Guidebook is the new book being put out by those responsible for googlesightseeing.com. Actually it's one book with two different titles for different markets US and UK from different publishers. We've got almost 100 of our favourite sights from the last year, licensed ...

Yahoo! UI Library: Yahoo somewhat rules for this. A Free BSD license makes it even yummier. The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX. The UI Library Utilities ...

EULA for a web service excluding law enforcement officials?: Here's an interesting post on one of Spolsky's forums: I built a google maps website that maps out all the skateboard parks in North America. [...] My fear is that if I offer this service, cops will use the website to ...

Movable Type Plugin directory update: The list of Movable Type plugins just keeps getting better and better. Here's a big list of new ones, including a few for Google Maps integration, del.icio.us integration, and more. A good plugin API is an amazing thing, sometimes.

Panamanians Vote Overwhelmingly to Expand Canal: This is going to be interesting to watch. Panama voted yesterday to embark on the biggest project in the history of that country: widening the canal. The overhaul, to begin next year, will double the canal's capacity by adding a third set of locks ...

The Tarquin Engine: This is pretty interesting. The Tarquin Engine is a tool for the creation and delivery of zooming infinite canvas webcomics. In it's current form it exists as a series of Action Script routines within a Macromedia Flash FLA file. It also you to build cartoons like this ...

AFLAX: Flash developers are striking back against Ajax with Aflax: "Asynchronous Flash and XML." They're slinging heavy FUD. AJAX, especially at the level of Google Maps, is very difficult to get right. If you've got a large team and plenty of dollars, it can be done -- then you have ...

A dandy 40 acre estate in The Hamptons (click here for a Google Maps satellite image of the property.) The price tag on this estate sets an new record for residential real estate (wouldn't you love to be the sales guy on that deal!) A New York Post article ...

BBC Backstage :: How to get started: The BBC is doing something pretty cool. They're allowing people to create new applications using their content specifically their RSS feeds. You can participate in BBC Backstage by either building an application or web-based prototype that uses BBC content or, if you ...

What's a self-respecting Arab ski bum (or ski bunny) to do when baba takes the keys to the Gulfstream away, and he's stuck in Dubai for the weekend? He goes skiing in Dubai, of course! I hadn't heard about this place until a friend forwarded a message with photos about ...

Windows Live Local: I've been hearing a lot about Windows Live Local, but never knew quite what it was. Turns out it's a lot like Google Maps, but with the twist of "Bird's Eye View" images, which are at a 45-degree angle, not directly overhead. This link will take you ...

I was in the Bay Area couple of months ago for FM s Conversational Marketing Summit, and I needed to go visit a client down in Mountain View (no, not Google, though they were right down the street). I went south on the 101, but that was boring. I was looking ...

In 1976, a Frenchman made a film called "C'etait un Rendezvous" consisting solely of some guy driving a Ferrari really, really fast through the streets of Paris. The idea is that the guy wanted to meet his girlfriend (hence the title) and the film ends with him parking the car ...

I spent some time this morning looking at PureEdit. It bills itself as a CMS, which is a classification I don t know that I can agree with completely. For the record, I only watched a couple of screencasts and browsed through some of the code. I don t know if it ...

GM s Milford Proving Grounds is a weird place. It s a massive automotive testing facility two miles by three miles; 4,000 acres. Contained in it is a driving enthusiasts dream come true, and I imagine an automobile s nightmare. There s about every conceivable method and facility with which to ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...

I got to thinking the other day: exactly when do you have a content management system? We ve all built apps that manage content, but when do you graduate from a relational database with an admin section (RDBWAAS) to the lofty and deserved title of content management system? (Incidentally, I ...