Ghost of Midnight

… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum

Honing in online maps

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by No comments yet

Maps are important to neighborhood level online social networking.  From an announcement received today

Placebase, Inc., the makers of the Pushpin online mapping platform, today announced a partnership with Urban Mapping Inc. (UMI), the leading provider of enhanced of local interactive content. As part of this agreement, Urban Mapping’s neighborhood boundary database will be available on the Pushpin platform. A demonstration site is available at: http://www.pushpin.com/urbanmapping

This is similar to what the good folks at Maponics provide I believe.

Also, from Google Maps today… people can now drag address markers for businesses and houses to a more precise location.  So Google is asking its millions of users to do the honing in that it can’t currently do through brute force.  Seems like a good move.

I wonder how many addresses we have in the United States?  We have about 300 million people and 2.5 or so people/household… so about 120 million households (some of those in multi-unit buildings) plus businesses, institutions, etc.  I wonder what percentage of these millions of buildings could have their location refined via Google’s registered users?

And a wish… that the Google Maps API used better data… or, perish the thought, that is used the same data as Google Maps.

Posted in: Front Porch Forum, Local Online, Maps, Neighborhood


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