Ucrime.com Google Maps Mashup Provides Campus Crime Info
Universities and colleges all over were interested in reporting on the launch of Ucrime.com recently, a Google Maps mashup (from the same folks who created Spotcrime.com). It maps out campus crime incidents for slightly over 200 universities.
Crimes at Texas A&M U (click to enlarge)
One of the very earliest Google Maps mashup applications was another site which also pinpointed crime data with its real-world locations: ChicagoCrime.org, created by Adrian Holovaty. Graphically displaying crime info and statistic info onto map locations is one of the more compelling applications for online maps, IMHO.
Popularity: 2% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 10/01/2008 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: MapsGoogle-Maps, Mashups, Ucrime.com
Town Creates Smiley Face in Google Maps
Saw this interesting thing on Slashdot today:
Apparently this Russian town got a crowd of people to don yellow slickers and stand in a large smiley face pattern so that Google Earth and Google Maps could capture them in their next update.
Trick is, the Google Map screen-grab appears to be a very obvious hoax by a blogger dubbed “Heiner Wolf“. According to these photos, people really did turn out to form the smiley face — I would guess as part of a radio station promotion. But this blogger transposed the people onto the Google Maps image of the area. Lame!
There are plenty of instances of messages appearing in Google Maps pics, if you want to see real ones: examples of roof ads, cool things in Google Maps, marriage proposals, and the infamous Swastika Building.
Popularity: 3% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/25/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Mapsaerial-images, Google-Maps, hoaxes, Satellite-Images
Google Street View Icon In Party Clothes
The Google Street View dude icon is suddenly sporting a party hat and balloons:
Assumably the special icon is celebrating Google’s 10th Birthday, though there’s no mention of it on the Google Lat Long Blog.
Popularity: 6% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/23/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, MapsGoogle, Google-Maps, Street View
Google Adds Data to Georgia Maps?
Google announced additional map data for Georgia today on the Lat Long Blog, along with a few other countries.
This announcement comes on the heels of explanations a few weeks ago about why Google Maps was missing data for the Georgian Republic. A number of sources on the internet had claimed that Google had yanked map data for Georgia in order to not be facilitating the war that sparked in the region with Russia. Google stated that this was untrue — that the region had never had detailed roads displayed because they didn’t have a good source of information for the area yet. (I was one of the people duped by the spurious claims — surprising, since it’s patently apparent that the Russian military would ALREADY have good maps of their region!)
However, even though it’s great that Google is beefing up their map data, I have to say that publicising it and releasing it as they have done seems terribly precipitate. If you look at the screengrab above, you’ll see that the map data they added is just city name labels — no streets or roads connecting them up — and not even dots or outlines to show where the cities are actually located!
Popularity: 6% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/04/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, MapsGeorgia, Google-Maps
Text In Street View Could Be Used For Quality Improvement
Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped observes that Google could potentially use OCR (optical character recognition) to attempt to derive text from signage and such within Google Street View images in order to create further enhancements.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Street View, Los Angeles.
However, I see a much more immediately valuable use that could be put to text scanned from the images — quality improvement of address pinpointing functionality.
Popularity: 8% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 08/05/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Maps, Research and DevelopmentGoogle Street View, Google-Maps, Mapping
Marriage Proposals Via Google Maps
What is it with Google Maps that seems to inspire people to propose marriage?
(Click to enlarge - Marry Me Leslie)
Googler Michael Weiss-Malik, a member of the Google Geo Team, planned ahead and stood at the side of the road when the Google Street View pictures were being updated in a drive-by photo shoot. (Read Michael’s explanation of what he did and why.) Google has been aggressively expanding Street View images this summer.
Michael isn’t the first to have a marriage proposal appear in Google Maps. Here’s a few more we’ve collected in the past:
Popularity: 8% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 08/05/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, MapsGoogle-Maps, marriage-proposals, Roofvertising
Google Street View Attacked As Potential Tool For Child Predators
The Stop Child Predators organization has launched a campaign specifically targeting Google’s Street View as a tool that potentially enables predators to stalk and kidnap children more effectively.
Kids playing at a park in Google Street View
A video on the site presents Stacie Runemap, Executive Director of the organization, outlining how Street View shows pictures of neighborhoods, homes, playgrounds, schools and pics of kids. She further describes how Google Maps can be used to plot distances from your doorstep to bus stops and schools, suggesting that child predators could use the service to plan attacks or kidnappings. The site elsewhere describes how to request that Google remove photos from Street View.
Popularity: 10% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/23/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Maps, SecurityChild Protection, Google Street View, Google-Maps, Internet Privacy, Internet Security, privacy
Google Maps Introduces User Review Snippets in Listings
The Google Lat Long Blog announced today that they’ve introduced little snippets of a user review with each business listing for which they have reviews data:
To me, this seems like a bit of an experimental feature, since I tend to want to see a sampling of multiple reviews to try to get a balanced picture of what to expect from a business. Of course, one can click through and view multiple reviews, but why would I only want to see one sample — is there something being done to try to select the most-typical review for the business, or are they only selecting random ones?
Popularity: 12% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 06/10/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Mapsdirectories, Google-Maps, User Reviews
Whitepages.com Acquiring Snapvine, Focuses On Community Development
WhitePages.com is acquiring Snapvine, a service that allows people to associate audio files with various resources like social networks, photos, text, and blogs. Snapvine enables facilitates voice blogs, similar to podcasting, but perhaps with a little greater ease.
WhitePages states on their blog that they’ll use Snapvine’s technology to provide their users with free, private voicemail boxes. In addition, WhitePages will roll out other features such as email and SMS services.
I think this signals that WhitePages.com will be pursuing community development as an ongoing strategy to maintain and build their traffic. This could be a really strong strategy — encouranging community engagement could drive up usage and associated ad revenues considerably for the residential listings directory. WhitePages.com also offers yellow pages directory service through a partnership with Idearc’s Superpages.com.
Considering the rise of Twitter and other mobile phone services, VOIP applications like Snapvine could be poised to be the next big thing.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the deal likely comes in below previous valuations for Snapvine.
Popularity: 11% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 06/05/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Local Search, News, Yellow Pages, technologySnapvine, Social-Media, voip, white-pages, WhitePages.com
Opt Out of Google Street View?
The guys over at Google Sightseeing noticed that the Google Streetview camera in Fairbanks, Alaska apparently got covered over with plastic bags, obscuring some of the images that were shot.
This led to speculation that some enterprising residents had perhaps purposefully obscured the cameras out of privacy concerns - though, that seems moderately unlikely to me since I doubt most people know what the car even is when it’s tooling around, shooting photos of places. (more…)
Popularity: 14% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/08/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, MapsGoogle-Maps, privacy, Street View, Surveillance
