Vacations, diversions and roadtrips:
On The Way suggests attractions and reststops for any route.
The Weekend Map shows events and activities for 27 American cities for the coming weekend.
Nerdy Day Trips (previously) suggests trips for geeks of all kinds, while
Trazzler suggests daytrips for where you live. Don't have a car?
Mapnificent (previously) shows you where you can get to from any point in a given time using public transit.
EveryTrail suggests walks, rambles, strolls and hikes. Google's new
HotelFinder service locates places to stay in a sketched area on a map, with a range of options.
via
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Dec 14, 2011 -
7 comments
"Looking at the world through via Google Earth offers striking images of the diversity of our planet and the impact that humans have had on it. Today's entry is a puzzle. We're challenging you to figure out where in the world each of the images below is taken. (You'll find answers and links at the bottom of the entry.) North is not always up in these pictures, and, apart from a bit of contrast, they are unaltered images provided by Google and its mapping partners. So I invite you to open up Google Earth (or Google Maps),
have a look at the images below, and dive in. Good luck!"
posted by vidur
on Aug 3, 2011 -
22 comments
The Newspaper Map: browse thousands of local, regional and national newspapers from around the world, based on geographical location. Filter and translate languages, see newspaper archives back to the early 19th century, and find fourth estate Twitter and YouTube feeds. A
mobile version is also available.
via
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Jun 7, 2011 -
7 comments
The official "StreetView" map of China is eerily reminiscent of SimCity, rendered in perfect isometric perspective without a pixel out of place:
Shanghai, the
Forbidden City,
Guangzhou, and
Hong Kong. That hasn't stopped companies from trying to create a more true-to-life photographic alternative: there is coverage of
Hong Kong and
Macau in Google Street View; sanction to cover the rest of China appears to have been given to
City8, which covers 40 cities. (The latter site is in Chinese, but Chrome or language plugins do a decent job of translating the content).
[more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Mar 17, 2011 -
34 comments
With
kettling becoming a commonly deployed tactic by the London Met, students from the University College London are fighting back with
Sukey, launched this morning.
[more inside]
posted by asymptotic
on Jan 29, 2011 -
56 comments
The
nuclear weapons simulator at CarlosLabs
(previously) has been updated to include fallout wind drift, pressure and thermal events to evaluate the impact of everything from a suitcase nuke to the
Tsar Bomba on your city. The
Missile Range Tool can show if you are in the vicinity of any delivery systems currently in service, or compare your location to the range of those used historically, such as the V2. For the effects of the cosmic collisions of asteroids and comets (and featuring rather more science) there's the
Earth Impact Effects Program.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Nov 1, 2010 -
41 comments
"With the midterm elections in the U.S. Senate just six weeks away, everyone is wondering how the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats will shake out after November 2." Wonder no more with Google's
2010 U.S. Election Ratings Map. Information can be filtered by state, type of race (senate, governor, house), and by source. A Google Maps
blog entry has more detailed info for those who want to dig deeper into the application. [via
TechCrunch]
posted by bayani
on Sep 21, 2010 -
20 comments
Hypercities, currently in beta, is a
collaborative effort to enable users to travel forward and backward in time within major cities of the world, watching changes take place over both the short (political protests in Tehran) and long (history of the city of Rome) term. Locative technologies are pushing the same ability into smartphones:
Walking Through Time (Android, iPhone) allows the user to overlay their current location with a map of the past.
[more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Sep 7, 2010 -
17 comments
Soundmaps are field recordings of the unique audio ecology of a particular place and time. Often they are cities:
New York,
Berlin,
Montreal,
New Orleans,
Barcelona,
London (previously),
Madrid, and
many others. Sometimes they move through space:
Ramallah. Sometimes they are
mixable (probably my favorite, from Portugal). They might be of entire countries (
Spain, the
United States (previously), the
United Kingdom, or continents (
Africa, while on a bike!). Sometimes they cover the
entire world:
aporee (you may prefer the map interface). Some attempt to
preserve sounds that are in danger of being lost. And sometimes soundmaps are of the
deep ocean.
Most of the sounds are, appropriately, licensed under Creative Commons.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Sep 6, 2010 -
8 comments
Historypin uses Google Maps and Street View technology and hopes to become the largest user-generated archive of the world's historical images and stories. Historypin lets you layer old images onto modern Street View scenes, giving a series of peaks into the past. Upload and pin your own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the map.
posted by dobbs
on Jun 29, 2010 -
20 comments
Google has invented the Holodeck. Well, not really, but for the moment it's probably the next best thing. Google's Liquid Galaxy Project, a virtual glass elevator that lets you fly around the world, makes for a stunning presentation. Developed as part of Google’s “20 per cent time” initiative, which sees its engineers encouraged to pursue their own projects on company time, Liquid Galaxy allows users to fly through the Grand Canyon, leap into low-Earth orbit and back down into the oceans and even perch oneself on the Great Pyramid of Giza, all without even breaking a sweat.
Check out the amazing video here.
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 11, 2010 -
61 comments
Biblemap.org is an interactive map system for the bible, which is great for visualising where certain biblical events are said to have occured. It's also great for people who don't subscribe to any kind of organised religion but do like looking at maps (like me!).
posted by Effigy2000
on Jun 14, 2009 -
24 comments
NextBus uses GPS to tell you the predicted time of the next bus. Google maps show buses in real time, and you can get updates on your phone/PDA. The coverage is limited to certain agencies within the US, so these other sites might be useful:
Hopstop covers subways and buses in NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, DC, and more. (
mobile version)
Google Transit has many US metro areas in addition to Canada, Europe, and Japan.
(previously) Many more locations inside.
[more inside]
posted by desjardins
on Oct 21, 2008 -
36 comments
I though documenting my early sex life would be a perfect reason to use Polaroids to do something other than take naked pictures, yet to still play on the sexual identity of the medium. I lived in Alexandria from 1980 to 1999. These were my formative years and they determined the way I dealt with women.
A guy documents the
spots in his old neighborhood (SFW) where he got kissed, dumped, laid or confused as a kid, and tries to work out "what went wrong." (
via,
via — both NSFW)
posted by nebulawindphone
on May 7, 2008 -
13 comments
Twittervision is a browser app using Google Maps to show Twitter comments as they happen in (more or less) real time.
posted by zardoz
on Mar 28, 2007 -
54 comments
a Google Maps view of NYC, centered on Central Park Google Maps has started displaying subway stops (with the names of the lines that serve each each stop) in New York City. Clearly this is a work in progress (full building outlines are available only in some parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and some subway stops currently list only one of the multiple trains that serve the stop). Still, this is excellent news not only for natives but also for tourists (whose only subway-map reference may be the significantly, sometimes radically "not to scale" version put out by the MTA).
posted by allterrainbrain
on Feb 9, 2007 -
46 comments
Where in the world was your first kiss? Share your memories with the rest of the world at WhereIHadMyFirstKiss, a fun Google Maps mashup site. Visitors can place a marker to indicate where on earth they were when they received their first kiss, and can leave comments to share their good (or bad) recollections of the event.
posted by amyms
on Jan 20, 2007 -
75 comments
MTBGuru is a new site that enables bikers, hikers and runners to upload GPS info, along with photos and comments, from their routes that get mashed up with Google Maps to create an ever-expanding trail resource. Mostly Bay Area now but that is changing.
posted by fenriq
on Nov 29, 2006 -
9 comments
