mapping

On Wednesday at Siggraph, I attended an interesting panel (details here) on the subject of "The Potential of End-User-Programmable Worlds."

In addition to the two organizers, the panelists included Paul Hemp of Harvard Business Review, Asi Lang of Linden Labs (the company that runs Second Life), and Vernor Vinge. Vinge is a faculty alumnus of San Diego State University, but better known as the author of "9 or 10 science-fiction novels," as he says. (I asked about that uncertainty; he said it's more about the definition of a novel than his ability to remember what he's written.)

You may have seen some of the recent news about Second Life. Last week, Linden Labs shut down… Read more

When brilliant ideas smash against the banks of your brain and threaten to overflow the narrow borders of a digital sticky note or notepad, mind-mapping software can contain the surge, and more--it can divert thought flows into manageable streams. Part brainstorming notepad and part presentation software, FreeMind's freeware canvas for Mac and Windows provides a visual, quasi-linear outlet for complex ideas.

FreeMind isn't the only software for the job, and it doesn't do everything, but when commercial mind-mapping products such as ConceptDraw Mindmap and Mindjet MindManager cost between $150 and $300, quibbles over FreeMind's minor function limitations seem suddenly petty.… Read more

Google has added four more cities to its Maps street view: San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando, Fla. San Diego is getting the same high-resolution imagery treatment that Google gives San Francisco; I'm not sure why. I asked Google about this and this is the response I got:

"As you probably know, Street View imagery is gathered by Google and a third-party data provider. Imagery in San Diego, like San Francisco, was gathered by Google. Our focus is on providing coverage for as many cities as possible; I don't have any additional details about our imagery … Read more

Apple's iWeb, one part of the iLife consumer apps suite, has received an interesting update this morning. iWeb is Apple's consumer-level Web site creation tool, and it gives users a simple way to drag and drop various Web site elements as well as fill in the included templates. The latest version is getting integration with two of Google's services: AdSense and Google Maps. iWeb users can now sign up for AdSense right inside the application, and pick how they want it to show up on their site. From the looks of the screenshots, it's much easier … Read more

Part of what differentiates blogging from print media is the option to link to external Web sites to offer readers additional information--something you just can't do as easily in a newspaper or magazine. While the Internet is also known as the World Wide Web, in terms of blog links, things end up looking more like nested hierarchies. A new search engine called Walk2Web aims to let users explore these hierarchies as part of an interesting visual journey, that lets you see where each blog is linking.

To begin, just enter a URL. It can be an entire site URL, … Read more

We all know that online maps have their faults. One of them is that they tend to be optimistic.

Google and Yahoo maps offer real-time traffic data with color coding on the map of the congested areas. But we all knew that the driving time given on the map was not reliable because it wasn't factoring in the actual traffic conditions.

Well, Google has fixed that. Now, Google Maps offers a time estimate if driving in heavy traffic, such as rush hour.

For instance, if I plan to drive from the CNET offices in downtown San Francisco to Google'… Read more

OK. This post may be very San Francisco-centric. But I expect more from Yahoo Maps than the misspelling of a legendary city district.

Haight Ashbury may have a Ben & Jerry's ice cream shop and an increasing number of overpriced shoe stores now, but it was ground zero for a cultural movement in the 1960s that still greatly influences sex, drugs, and rock and roll 40 years later.

According to Yahoo Maps, though, it's spelled "Height Ashbury."

Interestingly, the man at the helm of Yahoo, co-founder Jerry Yang, was born in 1968, a year after the … Read more

In the old days, to figure out if your house, apartment, or place of work was good for walking, you'd have to go scout it out, or ask someone who knew the area. These days we have services such as Walk Score, a mashup that helps calculate how "walkable" an address is based on the services that surround it. It works by tallying up the distances to the surrounding attractions, and pulls them together in an average, which it gives you in a handy scale of 1 to 100. The higher the score, the more walk-friendly the … Read more

Google has acquired ImageAmerica, a company that builds high-resolution cameras and uses them to take aerial photographs.

The search engine giant announced the move Friday on its LatLong blog about Google Earth and its other mapping efforts. It didn't disclose terms of the deal.

"We're excited about how ImageAmerica's technology will contribute to our mapping services down the road," Product Manager Stephen Chau said on the blog. "Since we're in the research and development phase right now it may be some time before you see any of this imagery in Google Maps or … Read more