onfocus

If I could embed a sound file of crickets chirping in this post, I would. My non-web world is busy at the moment, so the blog suffers.

Google Maps really is all that.

Here are some weblogs I read regularly, but aren't on my sitegeist sidebar:

• Whiskey Bar
• Cool Hunting
• we make money not art
• Spin of the Day
• CoolGov

There are many many more, but that's a start. Back to the crickets.

Amazon's search engine added pictures of storefronts to their yellow pages. For example, here's camera shops in Portland. Here's their description of how they did it. This seems like it'd be a nightmare to keep up to date, but Amazon is a huge company with lots of resources. Will they let business owners update their photos themselves? And I wonder if any of these bulk photos caught snippets of people living their lives (by accident). In any case, it's great to see the world wide web getting local like this.

Update: heh, Alan Taylor was wondering the same thing about unintentional A9 photos, and he set up a Flickr tag (a9local) to track interesting images anyone finds. (For example, what is this thing?)

Last night I played around with worldKit—a Flash mapping program. (You may remember this from such flash maps as The World as a Blog.) Their tagline is "Easy Web Mapping", and that's very accurate. I decided to build a geographic map of recent posts by Oregon bloggers, and I had it up and running in about an hour. worldKit has a simple XML config file, and it accepts geo-tagged RSS as input. Using their MapProxy, you can build custom images based on satellite photos, topographic maps, or the tiger census maps. With a few tweaks to the tiger URLs the MapProxy provides, I had the map I wanted. And "Oregon as a Blog" was born on the ORblogs Cities Page. (Of course you'll need Flash installed to view it.)

Check out the cover of the forthcoming Mapping Hacks—full color!

Somewhat related, a weblog about maps: The Map Room.