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So you can virtually stroll up and down city streets. Big whoop. A new startup called EveryScape promises to take that interactivity one step further. Unlike Microsoft and Google's virtual maps, EveryScape will let users explore both the outside and inside of major cities.

On Tuesday, the company will launch four mapped virtual cities: San Francisco, Boston, New York and Seattle. In addition to giving online tourists the standard street level views, users can also access the insides of restaurants, hotels, stores and many other landmarks while on their virtual tours.

Turns out, the latter feature isn't that far a leap for EveryScape. Previously known as Mok3, the company has actually been selling mapping technology and services to hotels and resorts for five years. But extending that experience to entire cities is no small endeavor. In that vein, EveryScape's taking a smart approach.

Visitors to the site are not only encouraged to tour various cities and towns, but also to collaborate and share in the very creation of them, according to an earlier press release. "For example, while 'walking' through Union Square in San Francisco via EveryScape.com, users can window-shop storefronts as well as tour the inside of those stores, see their offerings, and access published reviews and other information," the company said.

Furthermore, you can also add your own personalized content, including relevant links, reviews, rankings and so on. EveryScape previously said it plans to launch 10 major metropolitan areas by the end of 2007. While those plans may have been a bit ambitious, the company is nevertheless asking users to vote on additional cities and towns to be created. Members of the local communities will then be enlisted to help in the creation of those online experiences.

CORRECTION: The launch cities we listed this morning were incorrect, according EveryScape. The company has yet to release precise details on which cities will get the mapping treatment. We regret the error.

These virtual globes are being put to an unexpected range of uses. Google Earth was used to co-ordinate relief efforts in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Tax inspectors in Buenos Aires are using it to see whether people are correctly reporting the size of their properties. An Italian programmer who was using the software noticed odd markings on the ground near his home town which turned out to be a previously unknown Roman villa. Roofers, landscape gardeners and solar-panel installers use the virtual maps to scout for potential customers. Rebecca Moore, a member of the Google Earth team, used the software to galvanise her neighbourhood in the Santa Cruz mountains in opposition to a nearby logging project. And the Amazon Conservation Team, an American charity, equipped 26 indigenous tribes in the Amazon with hand-held global positioning system units and computers running Google Earth, to enable them to assert their legal sovereignty in the face of threats from loggers and miners.

“It's turning into a map of historical significance,” says John Hanke, head of Google's Earth and Maps division, and another of Keyhole's founders. “It is going to be a map of the world that is more detailed than any map that's ever been created.” He may be understating the technology's importance.

The world-wired web

Geobrowsers are a stunningly effective means of visualising the planet. But they are just one part of a broader endeavour, the construction of a “geoweb” that is still in its infancy, much as the world wide web was in the mid-1990s. The web did away with many geographical constraints, enabling people with common interests to communicate, regardless of location. Yet placelessness jettisons some of the most useful features of information, which are now attracting new attention.