Map Quests Take It to the Streets
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What's the best way to provide digital driving directions to the likes of Google and Garmin? May the best map win. By Wilson Rothman from Wired magazine.
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Cash'n'Carrion Designer cartography from The Rockall Times
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By Alyson Crean, Florida Keys Keynoter, Marathon  Feb. 28--It may have seemed a good idea at the time, but initiating a land-mapping for allotting building permits continues to hit snags.
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Cities in the US are using a global positioning software system in their efforts to control graffiti.
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With Web sites like Yahoo and MapQuest giving away maps and driving directions it seems like a waste of money to buy a standalone program that basically does the same thing. To survive, software publishers need to offer a lot more than the online freebies. Microsoft Corp.'s Streets &amp; Trips 2005 does just that.
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Google Maps has updated some of the street maps or hybrid views of major US cities with Metro and Subway stations and pencil outlines of buildings.  This my be a sign of Google Transit expansion, but even if not, it&#8217;s a great new addition to Google Maps. [Hattip : Google Operating System] Advertisement:  Text Link Brokers Sell [...]
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In New York City, street vendors sell goat-meat tacos, sour-plum slushes, mini egg rolls, chocolate egg creams and crepes -- and that just covers the food. In the District, the choice often comes down to hot dogs and handbags.
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Out-of-date ad kerbed O2 has been rapped over the knuckles by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for a recent advert promoting its deal with Streetmap.co.uk.â¦
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NEW YORK -- By 9 a.m., the line outside Manhattan's Nintendo World store was snaking down the block.
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(InfoWorld) - While drivers are accustomed to using traffic reports to assess road conditions, pedestrians who navigate cities are typically left without aid to determine the best route. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using wikis and the Semantic Web look to change the way people map and navigate their cities. The Wiki City project, run by MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, aims to apply wiki technology to the mapmaking process. The project's ultimate product will permit anyone to upload content to a map and utilize Semantic Web principles to cross search multiple layers of information. Wiki City Rome, an early incarnation of the project's user-generated maps, used GPS and cell phone data to produce a real-time map during an all-night festival held in the city on Sept. 8. A Web site featuring a satellite image of Rome displayed event locations and the position of buses and pedestrian traffic in real time. Buses equipped with GPS devices fed their locations to the project every minute, while cell phone data was constantly received to show how crowds were moving around the city. An image of the map was also projected in one of Rome's main squares. "If people know about the state of their environment in real time (as opposed to a static map), they can make better informed decisions about how to move about in the city which in term increases efficiency," Kristian Kloeckl, one of Wiki City Rome's team leaders, wrote in an e-mail interview. Wiki City Rome served as an initial step in the Wiki City project. Future projects involve introducing the wiki city concept to other cities that have partnered with the SENSEable City Laboratory. The list currently includes only European cities because their public transportation networks and outdoor spaces correspond with the project's aim of studying how people react and move about in public spaces, Kloeckl said. But the project is applicable to non-European cities, he said. He mentioned that a Boston-area furniture company is interested in placing displays in their products that would show a wiki city map. Wiki City reseachers ultimately want to introduce full wiki concepts to the project and allow any person or business to upload information to a map, Kloeckl said. The wiki method of permitting anyone to add any information lends itself to fraudsters. One possible resolution involves introducing a ranking system similar to the one eBayÂ uses with sellers. "Users supply the rankings. The system is completely independent. People gradually acquire reliability. This approach would be the most coherent for this type of structure," Kloeckl said in a telephone interview. Wiki City wants to combine different levels of data that, when searched, provide an answer incorporating each level of data. In Kloeckl's vision of a person using a full-featured wiki city map, a runner would use the map to search for a jogging course based on a city's traffic and air quality as well as the runner's health. "Now making these layers intersect in a meaningful way should give you a proposal of a jogging path that corresponds to your combined query," Kloeckl wrote. Kloeckl also provided another example in which a person would use a map to locate a store with a specific bottle of wine and plot a course from the store to a friend's home. Some challenges remain before a real-time map helps people navigate their cities. While obvious devices to display a wiki city map include cell phones, PDAs, and smartphones, Kloeckl also wants more utilitarian structures, such as bus stops, to offer access to the maps. "Everyone is familiar with a bus stop," he said. "So it's using the data with objects people are familiar with." User interface issues also require additional thought, Kloeckl said. While users need to access the information with ease, uploading that data to the wiki also requires a simple method, Kloeckl said. He noted that the upload system must require little time and effort since some of the content will come from people who are moving around a city. Finally, the data layers need to be arranged in such a way that a search produces pertinent results. Solving this problem involves further developments in the Semantic Web, an evolving component of the Web being developed by the Worldwide Web Consortium. The Semantic Web aims to take data and apply standards that allow computers to play a greater role in locating, finding, and presenting information. This will permit computers to understand the standards and produce more contextual search results. "We need information that is time and place relevant so it can be queried on a semantic structure," Kloeckl said. "We need a way to structure data so that it can be cross-queried." Pedestrians may eventually turn to interactive maps to avoid the masses or catch a bus, at the same time that their movements become part of the map's display.
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Street hawkers are history. Savvy resellers use the web to turn tickets into cash. By Steve Knopper from Wired magazine.
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A new online feature of Google Maps called Street View is stirring up a debate over privacy concerns on the Web.
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Boats have become a necessary means of transport in the flooded streets of Quxian, north-east of Sichuan province. Picture:Reuters.
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In the heart of the city, it's not easy to be a winner. Crime, drugs, and an atmosphere of failure, accentuated by the fumes from MBTA buses and urban redevelopment projects, make it easy, and some argue excusable, to not be the best you can be.
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Blaming Google for your traffic woes is like a brick and mortar store blaming the city for its traffic. Once they walk through the door of your store, it is your responsibility to convert them.
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U.S. mobile phone users might not have to stop and ask for directions as often thanks to a new service from MapQuest.com that sends color maps and directions to their phones.
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Have you ever wondered how panoramic street-level map imagery is collected? They roll a Toyota van tricked out with tens of thousands of dollars worth of cameras, laser range detectors and global positioning hardware through the streets. Check it out.