geo2web.com

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A Sony ad campaign for its Walkman digital audio players shows subway network maps made from black Sony earphones. (Because they can’t be white earphones, silly.) In addition to the New York subway map poster making the rounds, there are also map posters for the London Underground (surprise, surprise) and the Sydney Metro. Via Gizmodo.

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Sorry folks, no post today.

However, many of you may be unaware that we operate a “backchannel” of sorts over at Twitter, where as well as a feed of all the posts from the main site, we also post some interesting stuff that doesn’t make it on here. So for the many people that don’t read our Twitter page, here the best links that you missed!

• There’s a large police turnout in Providence, RI.
• Apparently, this Australian Graffiti artiste reckons that “TRENT IS BENT“. I wonder what Trent has to say about that?
• French resident captured taking a dump in the street, eew!
• This creepy looking house is covered in stuffed toys.
• The Street View car gets a flat tyre repaired in the tiny town of Paraburdoo, Western Australia.
• Ford Model T driving down the street.
• Wild antelope on Google Street view!
• Flickr: Google Street View car gets a ticket.

If you’d like more like this, subscribe to our twitter feed!

Locations: Australia, France, North America / Categories: Street Views

View in Google Earth

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Mother Jones’s interactive map showing U.S. military presence worldwide from 1950 to 2007 is making the rounds online. But it’s a little misleading: it’s a heat map, but its scale is logarithmic, which tends to overemphasize smaller numbers. Trends, if any, are hard too see. And sometimes the numbers in question are in the low double digits — are we mostly mapping embassy personnel? Via Boing Boing.

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The Microsoft Virtual Earth blog announces that free 60-day trial versions of the newest (2009) versions of both Streets & Trips and MapPoint are now available for download. Be warned, both downloads are well over a gigabyte in size. While you’re at it, there are free pushpin images and construction updates for both programs.
PR blurbs:
“MapPoint [...]

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Last Olympics post for a while, I promise. This page is a Google Maps mashup that plots all medallists on their hometowns. It’s considerably cruder than the Earthgamz plugin (see previous entry), which also covers all athletes, but is more broadly functional. Via Google Maps Mania.

At the other end of the spectrum, I whipped up some very basic heat maps, using Google Spreadsheets’s map widget, showing the number of Olympic last-place finishers per country in this summing-up post on DFL.

Previously: Mapping Olympic Athletes; More Olympics Maps; Mapping the 2008 Olympics; BBC Olympics Maps.

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The Virtual Earth evangelist blog reports that trial versions of Microsoft’s MapPoint 2009 and Streets and Trips 2009 are now available as free downloads: MapPoint 2009 North America, Streets and Trips 2009.

Previously: MapPoint and Streets and Trips 2009.

• Buy Microsoft MapPoint 2009 at Amazon.com
• Buy Microsoft MapPoint 2009 with GPS Locator at Amazon.com
• Buy Microsoft Streets and Trips 2009 at Amazon.com

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The most notable thing about MapQuest’s new beta version is that there’s a map on the home page. That should give you an idea of how far down the field MapQuest’s competitors have taken things, and how far behind MapQuest has gotten: the default version still has just address and directions forms. The new version — detailed here and here — does catch up a little bit: there’s an option for a “copy and paste” address field, standard among the competition. It’s still not as easy to zoom, though. See reactions from All Points Blog (“Continuing on its ‘too little, too late’ strategy …”) and Digital Earth Blog.

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Turns out that driving a pick full force into rock-hard dirt four days a week can give you Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Who knew? That’s why posting has been light non-existent over the past two weeks. My hands are on the mend, and regular posting should resume shortly.
a
Carpal-Tunnelated

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I’ve been playing with the Thematic Mapping Engine, which is a web-based tool that allows you to generate visually compelling KML based on statics such as those available at UNdata. The less tech savy will be excited to note that this tool requires no coding skills whatsoever. So go ahead and impress your friends. Or check out these examples.

The resulting presentations are pretty darned nifty and you can control many aspects of how this information is displayed in both Google Earth and the Google Earth browser plugin.

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My reconnaissance of the Beijing Olympic Time Trial all started in December 2007. My coach Jim Miller and I traveled to Beijing, China to not only check out and ride the Time Trial course, and to experience the heavily publicized pollution problem first hand. (During my Gold Medal ride, it turned out to be a perfect day in Beijing.)
 
Much of the hype with the course centered on how non-traditional this 15-mile course was, especially with the sheer amount of climbing involved. At the encouragement of my husband (a technology buff) I took along one of his GPS units so as to get an elevation profile. While riding the course,I kept thinking to myself that we must be on the wrong road; there is just simply no way a time trial would have this much climbing! At the reassurance from my coach and much to my delight we were on the right course. 
 
After returning home to Boise, Idaho, I exported the GPS data to several different formats, one of which I was able to launch with Google Earth. I was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise. This capability along with having the elevation profile proved invaluable in my preparation for my Gold Medal race. It was also very nice to be able to show family members and friends the course from the excellent satellite views presented by Google Earth.
 
With all the requests that I’ve been getting since winning the Gold, I’ve become hooked on my next cool tool find Google Calendar. My publicist/manager, agent, and I are constantly checking and blocking out times on my calendar so we needed a way to share calendars and of course that’s never easy. Imagine my delight when I did a Google search for “calendars” and up pops Google Calendar — another great tool!

Posted by Kristin Armstrong, Olympic Gold Medalist, Women’s Individual Time Trial in Road Cycling

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I just joined Facebook. This is after a long, nightmarish experience of “friends” on MySpace forced me to delete my account (3 times) and depart from social networking sites altogether; however, I’m healed and recovered and now move forward with a Facebook account (don’t be offended if you friend request me and I decline - I’ve only included people in my network that I really know and trust; or, have imbibed large amounts of alcohol with). Digression, digression…..

There are a couple applications on Facebook that are using Microsoft Virtual Earth, so I figured I’d call them out here in case you want to add them to your profile.

MapMate
MapMate allows you to see where your friends are based on where they say they are. There’s no reverse IP, GPS, secret CIA satellite tracking mechanism or ghosts in the computer; although, if you have a stalker (s)he may hack your account and change your location. Anyway….the UI isn’t totally intuitive, so you need to read the help file….okay, I’ll help you! Once you have the application loaded onto your Facebook page, you click on MapMate and it will bring up a map of all of your friends who have MapMate and have specified their location. You can even drill down to street level to see EXACTLY where they are - muhahaha! Hey, you did allow them to be your friend, didn’t you? How do you specify your location? That’s the not so intuitive part. You need to navigate to where you are (yes navigate as they didn’t include a Find box) then right-click on your location. A red pin with an ERO pop up asking you to update your status. Click save and you’re updated! I can tell you right now I’m at the Westin South Coast Plaza….but who knows when I actually wrote this!

Aerobis
Aerobis is for the fitness nut. I just got back into fitness because I’m suddenly single (ladies….) and need to work off some aggression. I’m currently cranking out 2-a-days! Anyway, the application is a great way to track your performance and OMG it’s overwhelming how much there is, so here we go.

First off, complete the sport profile. The authors are German, so you’ll need to convert your height from inches to centimeters (1 inch = 2.54 cm) and your weight from pounds to kilograms (1 lb = .4535924 kg). Wow, I seem taller and skinner using the metric system! Rest and max pulse are require fields and I don’t know what mine are, so I’ll stop there and go to the other stuff. I did say, I’m just getting back into it.

Even without the profile, you can do things like upload a route (KML or GPX) to view it on the Virtual Earth map and save it to your profile. Or, you can create a route by click on the map and having the application draw the route and calculate the distance for you. I just learned the route I take on occasion is 3.7 kilometers (even that sounds better than 2.2 miles!). To pull up routes you’ve created, just click work in progress. You can also publish your route for others to see and search for routes that have been published by others. I found some ski & snowboard routes in South Africa…turns out to be water skiing. Even better! There’s tons more, so check out the Aerobis web site.

Got a Facebook application that uses Virtual Earth (and not, eh, other maps in combination with Virtual Earth)? Send it to me. I’m loving Facebook. I was a MySpace addict until well, you know, stuff happens. It’s good to be back.

CP

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Continuing on its “too little, too late” strategy, MapQuest has tinkered with its home page. The team has update the maps which now appear on the front page! Further the interface looks more, well, Google Maps-like with Traffic and Gas Buddy in buttons top right. Forms have been updated so you can toggle between a “key in” and “paste in” form. (Not sure why there can’t be one for both…)

Bottom line: if you love MapQuest, these enhancements will be nice, if you use something else, these enhancements don’t matter at all. For now the enhancements are on the “beta” site, but you can toggle back to the old one for comparison. Full details on the MapQuest blog.

Other reviews: Webware, Mashable

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QR Codes are two dimensional bar codes that can be used to store web addresses and other data in a form that can be quickly accessed by a mobile phone. Anyone with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the QR Code and the phone’s browser will automatically load the programmed URL. In this way locations in the real world can be linked to their on-line presence and, of course, to Google Maps.

Semapedia.org
Semapedia connects Wikipedia articles with real world locations. To create a QR Code for a Wikipedia article you just need to enter the article’s web address and Semapedia creates a PDF containing the QR Code that links to the article.

If you post the QR Code up at its physical location you will have helped hyperlink the world. Now when anyone visits the location they can point their mobile phone at the code and immediately be taken to the relvant Wikipedia article.

Semapedia has a Google Map of locations that have been hyperlinked in the real world. Each tag contains the name and the date of the tagger and a photo showing the QR Code posted on its location.

QRMap
QRMap is a great tool for creating QR Codes for a Google Map centred on any location. You can then use the code to direct mobile phone users to a Google Static Map of your location. For example a night-club could put the QR Code on a flyer so potential customers could quickly access a map of the club via their mobile phones.

To create the QR Code all you have to do is centre the QRmap on a location and press the envelope at the top of the screen. QRMap then creates an e-mail with a tiny URL to a web address where you can find your QR Code. The QR Code can then be cut and pasted into any document.

QR Code Mapplet

The QR Code Mapplet lets registered users create a Google Map with an embedded QR Code. It is possible therefore to create a map that users can scan to get directions to a business, to get the contact details of a business on their phone, or to visit a mobile website or mobile blog.

If users point their phones at the embedded QR Code they can also create a bookmark of a mobile website or mobile blog on their phones or note down an address on the mobile phone, just as they would using a pen and a paper.

Google Chart API
The Google Chart API is a good place to get started if you want to know how to create QR Codes.

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With this past weekend’s Beijing summer olympics closing ceremonies the event goes into hibernation for another four years. What will we recall? Phelp’s eight swimming golds? The Chinese taking more golds than another other country? A first olympic gold medal for Mongolia (in Judo)? Perhaps. But will anyone following the games say they learned a bit more about the world, about geography.

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