Maps, All Interactive Like

January 12, 2005 7:12 PM

Maps
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Found while searching for this thread.
posted by fenriq (23 comments total)

The sheer detail of these flash maps is astounding. Hundreds of restaurants in downtown Vancouver alone, with paragraph descriptions on mouseover... great find. Utterly superior for tourists. This is good.
posted by mek at 7:20 PM on January 12, 2005

Why, these appear to be maps.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 7:22 PM on January 12, 2005

Just having a look at Toronto. A few dots are in the wrong places, and there are a handful of spelling errors, but this is still pretty impressive.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 7:29 PM on January 12, 2005

I give up. You guys win.
posted by mcwetboy at 7:31 PM on January 12, 2005

Why thank you, fenriq.
posted by Hildago at 7:37 PM on January 12, 2005

Wow. Cool.
posted by xmutex at 7:48 PM on January 12, 2005

I went to map of France.

These maps suck.

Compare with the maps you can get at http://www.viamichelin.com/

,dave
posted by davebarnes at 7:57 PM on January 12, 2005

The sheer detail of these flash maps is astounding.

Not so much for some of the ones outside North America. Dublin has four hotels, and nothing else; London has five activities and no restaurants; Wellington has one shop...

Still, it's a cool idea, and many of these are pretty useful. Cheers.
posted by flashboy at 8:00 PM on January 12, 2005

I was about to poopoo this post, but it's not bad, even if the maps don't include a scale or where North is (and no, it's not always towards the top e.g. Montreal).

However, why not mention that every one of those links is to worldweb.com, a travel tourist guide, rather than a collection of useful maps from various sources.
posted by furtive at 8:02 PM on January 12, 2005

"This interactive map of the Seattle area pinpoints the city's wonderful attractions and accommodations. Be sure to click on the 'ZOOM IN' button below the map (followed by clicking on the map) to get a closer look at Downtown San Francisco!"

Nope, I zoomed in all the way, and it's still Seattle.
posted by BarePaw at 8:38 PM on January 12, 2005

Any map of SF that has fewer than 10,000 restaurants is a problem.

Still, a neat find. Thanks!
posted by googly at 8:54 PM on January 12, 2005

The map of Sydney's pretty good if you were a tourist, which 90% of the population is.

I need one of these for Beirut, pronto. Anyone got any good sources for maps of Middle Eastern & Scandinavian cities?
posted by cosmonik at 9:13 PM on January 12, 2005

DrJohnEvans: Why, these appear to be maps.

Hey, if you say so. You're the doctor.
posted by cosmonik at 9:15 PM on January 12, 2005

Cool design, but lacking a bit in the details. Dallas has more restaurants per person than New York, but they only show about six. And the Northern cut-off for the DFW map is 635, which means it really only shows about half the city. (There are probably now more shops, restaurants, and offices north of LBJ than there are south - so this is kind of a disadvantage for the business traveller and tourist.)
posted by sixdifferentways at 10:51 PM on January 12, 2005

The UK maps are totally crap, no detail, random towns and cities with no increase in information as you use the enlarge function, and a skeleton of red lines representing a random selection of major roads.
posted by biffa at 2:32 AM on January 13, 2005

Ottawa's odd too -- the map shows about ten square kilometres of downtown, and that's it. When you drag it, you get a black border one window-width over, then nothing. It reminds me of the sort of map you'd get on a placemat-sized piece of paper at a hotel.
posted by mendel at 4:22 AM on January 13, 2005

oh ya, v. useful! found a great place to stay in quebec city that way :D
posted by kliuless at 4:58 AM on January 13, 2005

The map of Sydney is *awful* -- it only covers the very center of the city & hence completely misses many of the areas tourists are likely to visit (Bondi, Coogee, Manly, Paddington) & the areas backpackers are likely to stay.

<quibble>It shows the Bridge Climb as being based somewhere in the harbour; also, it could do with some scroll-bars.</quibble>

I've had very little success finding decent online tourist-oriented maps of Sydney for visitors; there's nothing at the medium scale which is initially most useful for orientation.

Good map sites I use (these may all have been linked here before):

• Map24 (only US & Europe) which has some very cool features
• Multimap which can overlay aerial photos with semi-transparent streetmaps on IE & Firefox; a great feature, & one which NTK used to show how the Ordnance Survey maps of the UK omit many of the "secret" defence establishments such as Fylingdales & Aldermaston (search NTK for "multimap" to find their links)
• Streetmap
• Mapblast, now Microsoft MapPoint
• MapQuest
• Whereis

posted by infravires at 5:02 AM on January 13, 2005

infravires: cheers for that info, hadn't spotted the photo overlay on multimap before - very useful.
posted by biffa at 5:37 AM on January 13, 2005

Sorry about the weaker international maps, I did just a little bit of checking on them as I was mostly interested in the detail of places nearby, like Carmel and Santa Cruz for which the site has a pretty impressive but not comprehensive map.

Still pretty neat and I will definitely be using this the next time I have friends visit or when we go somewhere.
posted by fenriq at 7:40 AM on January 13, 2005

my favorite map site is the Perry-Casteneda map collection at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps. i use them every couple of days, and they update the page to have relevant maps at the top...right now they have tsunami maps and links.
posted by taumeson at 7:46 AM on January 13, 2005

Map24 is much better than these.
posted by grouse at 1:05 PM on January 13, 2005

I second taumeson on the awesomeness of the Perry-Casteneda collection. There are usually several options for any given area, and I really like the way they stay on top of current event type maps (right now, Iraq and tsunami maps are on top).
posted by whatzit at 5:53 PM on January 28, 2005