Ditu MyMap of Chinese Prisoners of Conscience Someone has created an excellent MyMap of Chinese netizens, lawyers, journalists and others who have been imprisoned in China for their political beliefs.
The individuals are shown on the map with thumbnail pictures and each thumbnail map marker includes a brief description of their alleged crime and a link to their page on Wikipedia.
Ditu is the Chinese localized version of Google Maps. Ditu is maintained on Chinese servers, which are subject to Chinese law (more on this in this Ogle Earth post). Therefore if this map interests you I would check it out quickly, as I'm not sure how long it will remain.
RoadTweets The September edition of National Geographic Traveler's magazine includes an article looking at the world's most beautiful, interesting, and off-beat road trips. RoadTweets has created 50 MyMaps that plot these drives on Google Maps.
Because these great drives are all shown in MyMaps it means that you can save the ones that you like and store them for future road trips. Alternatively, you can press the 'View in Google Earth' button and recreate a virtual version of the drive.
Yellow Maps New Zealand Yellow Pages in New Zealand has released a great new Google Maps mashup. As well as providing the expected business search the map also highlights NZ tourist spots, the best NZ drives, weekend getaways, the best camp-sites and NZ's Forest Parks.
Each point of interest on the map comes with an accompanying article and the option to view the street view of the location. If you zoom in on the map there is also the option to view a number of other layers, that include cash dispensers, medical centres and toilets. The map even has a great 'popular searches' option that provides quick links to the most popular searches on the map.
Flightm8 Have you ever had the problem of not knowing which airlines fly to your chosen destination? Flightm8 can tell you which airlines fly where.
To use Flightm8 you select the city from which you wish to fly. Once you have selected a city the nearest airports are shown on a Google Map. You then select the airport(s) you wish to fly from. Once you have repeated the process for your destination city Flightm8 will show you all the airlines that fly between your chosen cities.
Flightm8 even provides links to the airline so that you can book your flight.
Google has applied for a European patent that includes "full-motion video of 360 degrees images, and live feeds from video cameras to provide enhanced driving directions". This seems to suggest that Google has plans for a Street View feature that includes panoramic video.
Google's Street View technology was originally developed by Immersive Media. Immersive Media is a digital imaging company specialising in immersive video. They create panoramic videos that you can pan around inside whilst the video is actually playing. You can see how it works in the video below (just drag the image around to change your view).
Do Google have plans to provide a video version of Street View? Video Street View might not fit so easily with Google Maps as the present still images used in Street View. I'm guessing it would be much more difficult to stitch together a number of immersive videos than it is is to stitch together static images. When a video reaches a road junction the user would have only a very limited time to be able to click on any navigational button to jump to another video street view on the next road.
Google's patent application uses the context of driving directions. Using immersive videos in driving directions does sound possible. If Google had a number of immersive videos of different streets in theory it would be easy to stitch these together for a planned route. So if a Google Maps user wanted driving directions for a particular route it should be possible to fairly seamlessly stitch together a number of immersive videos to create an interactive panoramic video simulation of the actually drive.
This is of course just pure speculation. We will just have to wait and see what Google's real plans are for the patent application.
Ditu Google Maps in China (Ditu) has created a really cool traffic and road closures mapplet for the National Day of the People's Republic of China celebrations in Beijing.
What I really like about this mapplet is its use of a calendar, to enable users to view the road closures on different days. Clicking on any day in the calendar will load the road restrictions for that day. The map uses simple color coding for different restrictions. The red polylines and markers indicate that these roads are completely closed.
MapFlickr MapFlickr is a new map creation site that lets you create a Google Map to display your Flickr photoset.
Creating a map is very simple. You just select the required Flickr photoset and press create. That is essentially all you have to do. Your map is then created and you can then cut and paste a short piece of code to embed the map in your own website or blog.
MapFlickr also allows you to style the colour of your map border, the photo gallery buttons and the photo border colours. It is also possible to customise the size of your map, the number of photos you wish to display, the size of the photos and the type of map marker.
