For the 2010 Winter Olympics, Google took their Street View technology to the ski hill by mounting it on a snowmobile. They then built maps of several ski resorts. First, here’s a video of the snowmobile in action.
Before I opened up the map, I was skeptical this would be practical, but it is. It’s a great view into what each trail is like and would be useful for creating meeting spots on the mountain. And imagine if Google licensed this technology to the resort. They could put the cameras on top of the snowcat and have a new view of the groomed run each morning. That might seem like magic, but it can’t be far off.
Have you ever mocked your bridge and tunnel friends about they likely live at 300th St. & 35th Ave.? Well, now you have a tool to do so. Harold Cooper created ExtendNY to show what it would be like if the NYC street grid were expanded forever by measuring the distances between streets and avenues, accounting for the curvature of the planet, and extending it across the Earth. Manhattan’s north pole resides somewhere in Uzbekistan
The Sartorialst visits Paris and now they they think they’re New Yorkers? It might be tough from 64,908th St. and 12,778th Ave. Yeah, Chicago is just like Brooklyn, except it resides at 4,443rd St. and 4,363rd Ave.
I should note, this is another great project I discovered via Hack and Tell, a meetup in NYC.
If you use maps regularly, it’s pretty obvious that Google Maps is far more legible than Bing or Yahoo, but Justin O’Beirne explains why. The three primary reasons are white outlines around text, more diversity amongst label sizes, and label shading. His breakdown is incredibly clear, but I love this extra point.
When you are looking at a big city, Google removes smaller cities outside of the metro area. Below, I’ve included one of Justin’s image where he used the Google Maps API to remove everything but the city labels. The results are striking.
I still can’t believe it, but all of the images from this blog are pulled directly from Google Street View. I wonder if the drivers of the van ever feel like war photographers. Should I call this in or just keep driving?
Looking at photo data, Eric Fischer creates maps that show what areas are dominated by local or tourist photographers.
Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).
Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).
This an interactive heat-map visualization of cab pickups throughout NYC over the course of a week. Be sure not to miss the accompanying article, as its chock full of goodness.
Last May, in the entire month, about 554,000 yellow taxis picked up passengers in the East Village; in Inwood at the northern end of Manhattan, pickups numbered only 860, according to the data compiled by Sense Networks.
Sense Networks produces CabSense, an iPhone app that “analyzes tens of millions of GPS data points from NYC taxis to help you find the best corner to catch a cab”.
I want to know if there is an app geared towards cabbies that would tell them where the most lucrative cab rides begin. They could probably charge a lot for that data.
“Crumpled City Maps are soft, yet hard-wearing, waterproof and meant to be creased and crumpled. You can place the area that you’re interested in on the palm of your hand to spot street names then just screw it up, stuff it back into its case or your pocket, and carry on.” via Information Aesthetics
