Rebecca Solnit on how Silicon Valley corporations are transforming San Francisco: I weathered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment to a Google engineer last year and ventured out into both the rental market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term) with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable finances would open a path. That confidence got crushed fast. It turned out that the competition for any apartment in San Francisco was so intense that you had to respond to the listings – all on San Francisco-based Craigslist of course, the classifieds website that whittled away newspaper ad revenue nationally – within a few hours of their posting to receive a reply from the landlord or agency. The listings for both rentals and homes for sale often mentioned their proximity to the Google or Apple bus stops. [more inside]
posted by liketitanic on Jan 31, 2013 - 143 comments

Wiki City Rome - "anyone with an Internet connection will be able to see a unique map of the Italian capital that shows the movements of crowds, event locations, the whereabouts of well-known Roman personalities, and the real-time position of city buses and trains."
posted by Gyan on Sep 7, 2007 - 3 comments

Web 2.0 overload - "eHub is a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing." Tons of links to mashup apps like PervWatch, Podomatic, ThinkFree, etc, etc, etc...(note: a lot of these sites are in beta)
posted by tpl1212 on Sep 30, 2005 - 41 comments

Oakland, CA has a pretty cool application of GIS on the web. You can look up crime statistics and analyze the data by overlaying it with community information (where police districts are, where liquor stores are located). It only runs in Netscape for windows, so here's a screenshot.
posted by mathowie on Dec 29, 1999 - 0 comments