Jeremy Price's personal annotations on this page
Forestfortrees bookmarked
on 2007-10-20
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"It's always been the case that maps have value because they show one subset of data and hide the rest," says David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, a new book about the value of disorder in the information age. Given the infinite data that can be layered into Google Earth, however, we can now "include everything, then sort and draw the maps on the fly."
This link has been bookmarked by 9 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Jun 2007, by Danzi L.
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Julia Lesagefrom Wired, 6/28/07
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"It's always been the case that maps have value because they show one subset of data and hide the rest," says David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, a new book about the value of disorder in the information age. Given the infinite data that can be layered into Google Earth, however, we can now "include everything, then sort and draw the maps on the fly."
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Eight weeks later, he had a demo that linked craigslist housing ads to pins he'd added to a Google map. One Thursday night, he posted a link to the demo on craigslist, and by the next day thousands of people had already taken it for a spin. "I had no idea how big it would be," he says. "I just wanted to write something that was useful."
Rademacher's HousingMaps was an even bigger hit inside Google. The company hired him and opened up the Google Maps code so anyone could work with it. Microsoft and Yahoo followed suit, and before long the Web was awash in map mashups.
"Someday, there will be the Paul Rademacher statue in front of the Googleplex," says Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. Today, the number of mashed-up Google Maps exceeds 50,000. (Google Maps itself is now the second-most-trafficked mapping site, after MapQuest.) Practically overnight, new companies were formed to meet the demand for Web sites and software tools to help people create and distribute their maps. Platial features thousands of user-generated maps of favorite bookstores, bar crawls, and road trips. Panoramio lets users peg their personal photos to Google maps, and it has already logged more than a million pics.
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Jeppe Kabellfrom Wired Magazine
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