mapping

Here's an oldie but a goodie if you're a Simpsons fan. It's an interactive map of Springfield, the fictional home of The Simpsons that has been painstakingly recreated based on various appearances throughout the show's 19 seasons.

The map was drawn using locations that were featured on the show, as long as they appeared more than once. Some of the spacing was determined using recent aerial shots (there's a listing here).

The map was started in 2001 by Jerry Lema and Terry Hogan. The current version is about four years old (so there are no … Read more

I bet you didn't know there's an easy way to see what terrorist or suspicious activities are happening around the world, on a map. Are you curious as to where there have been UFO sightings? How would you like to map your photos or, even potentially more useful, find a public toilet near you?

Mike Pegg over at the Google Maps Mania blog has created an entertaining and handy list of 100 things you can do with Google Maps mashups.

The options range from the very convenient, such as how to find cheap gas in your area or … Read more

It's always fun to see people try to map out the internet. The comparison to a spider's Web is apt, as things get a little complicated. While not nearly as humorous as efforts from Web comic XKCD (here and here), design agency Information Architects Japan has taken to the more calculated cartography medium of urban subway systems.

Last year the company created two versions of the map. Both were based on the Tokyo area train map (which is enormous) and organized 200 popular Web sites by neighborhood. This year, the firm ramps the number sites up to 300, … Read more

Comedy troupe The Vacationeers has a new video parodying Google Maps and its Street View feature. Shortly after the introduction of Street View, privacy concerns were raised by several groups regarding the amount of zooming and the capturing of license plate numbers, but nobody's come close to comparing it to a formidable and mysterious opponent the likes of the smoke monster on J.J. Abrams' Lost.

I desperately hope this becomes a series.

[via Digg]

Remember that feature Google rolled out back in November of last year that let users edit location markers? This morning the company's released a new Maps visualization to let you watch a portion of those user edits in real time. Like some of the Flickr and Twitter mashups that have done the same thing with photos and messages, you can glean a certain level of entertainment off watching people's changes, and as long as you're sitting far enough back from your computer monitor you can avoid the Cloverfield-like nausea when the map quick pans to the next location (seriously).

From my time watching the page this morning, nearly all of the changes remained within the United States with just a few trips to southern England. This could mean that either Google's localizing the data feed, or trying to keep the transcontinental panning to a minimum.

Google Maps continues to be one of Google's fastest changing services within the last year. Just yesterday it finally got list reordering as part of My Maps (previously user-created maps would remain in the order of the spot or landmark at the time it was created), and earlier this month it added live Doppler radar and satellite weather reports as a mapplet.

See it in action an animated GIF after the jump.

… Read more

We're always on the lookout for smart travel tools, and World Taximeter is no exception. It's an intelligent mashup, combining directions from Google Maps with local cab fares. It'll let you know how much the ride should cost using local rates by distance and time of day, and combining that with live traffic estimations from Google. Depending on what country you're in, it'll also give you the heads up on any additional charges, like if you're booking it over the phone, or traveling on a weekend. For anyone who's visiting a foreign country … Read more

Microsoft has launched Live Search 地图, the China branch of its Virtual Earth project.

Compared with Google's ditu.google.cn and Sogou's (搜狗) map.sogou.com, the site seems about the same, if a little faster--though traffic may still be low. What Google and Microsoft have in common is that the maps contain listings for restaurants, banks, and other locations rendered as icons on the map. Sogou has no such advantage, but sometimes it resolves addresses better than Google.

But here's the interesting part: Microsoft's new service includes major highways and the locations of main cities on Taiwan. … Read more

While computer monitors and TV screens continue to become the size of small stars, there's no beating the real thing short of visiting a planetarium, or lately--Google Earth. Yesterday Google unveiled the second iteration of Google Sky for Google Earth at the Astronomical Society's annual conference in Austin, Texas. Among the more notable additions is podcasting that's been integrated into the Earth and Sky layer. These short 90-second podcasts will tell you anything that's coming up this week (or that's historically taken place), and you can listen to them right from the app via … Read more

Two of the most useful online services have got to be maps and weather.

With this in mind, The Weather Channel Interactive is offering a new mapplet for Google Maps that lets people add customizable weather layers to maps and see weather data on Google Earth (download it for Windows or Mac OS X).

One click and you can see the clouds over San Francisco on Google Maps. Pop-up bubbles provide more detailed information like current conditions including temperature, humidity, wind speed and UV Index. You can also find links to forecasts and track storms.

The weather information combines data … Read more