Businesses and landmarks are important because they make maps more in line with the way people think, instead of the way that computers operate. This change also means that businesses won’t have to resort to painting their rooftops to be easily identifiable.

There are two big challenges with what Google is doing:

• Names of businesses and landmarks change over time. The ballpark two blocks from my house has gone through three names following the telecom mergers (start watching at 2:20). Still, these new labels provide a good way to get oriented.
• Deciding which items help the user and which are just clutter. Google Maps shows the relatively obscure Powerset but leaves out Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus. I haven’t been able to figure out a pattern in what Google decides what to show.

We’ve come a long way from the early days of the Web when maps consisted largely of roads and a clunky user interface. We’ve seen the addition of aerial imagery, building outlines, photos, public transit, Street View, neighborhoods, user-generated content and live traffic. Google has driven much of this innovation, although to be fair MapQuest had aerial imagery first and A9 had a version of street view early on.

There is still a lot of work to do to improve maps:

• College and corporate campuses. Campuses such as Google’s and Microsoft’s buildings have numbers, but these aren’t shown on the map. If you were meeting someone, they’d probably tell you to go to “Building 43″. My friend Adam at Google keeps a custom Google map to show where his building is. (Oddly, Microsoft’s Bing maps show building numbers for the Microsoft campus, but don’t let you search for them.) The same thing applies for airport terminals.
• Controlled-access facilities. Businesses in controlled-access facilities should be hidden by default — few people are going to park and go through security to eat at an airport restaurant. On the other hand, if I’m in the airport, I want to know what businesses are in my terminal.
• Handling nonstandard locations. Databases are organized around cities and states in the United States. This works for most places, but is problematic in areas that don’t follow the convention like Hawaii or Las Vegas. Hawaiians talks about islands, but the local databases don’t know the concept of an island. This is made worse by the fact that the same town name is used on multiple islands — there’s a Waimea on Kauai and Hawaii and a Kailua on Oahu and Hawaii. Local constructs such as “North Shore” and “South Shore” aren’t understood either. Navigating using local search on my recent trips to Hawaii was error filled.
  In Vegas, hotels are a primary navigation construct and many of those hotels have more shops and restaurants than do a lot of American towns.
  Given how popular these destinations are, I’m surprised this problem hasn’t been solved.
• Parking availability. In a big city it’s rare that you can drive up to your destination and park right in front; finding parking can easily add 15-20 minutes to your trip. Companies like Urban Mapping are already collecting this information. I had a book called Park It Here! that showed street parking restrictions for every block in Manhattan. I’d love to see that data online.

More on: google, maps, local search

Mount Rainier looks an awful lot like an office tower to me. That'll be one steep climb!

In reality it’s a 2 1/2 hour drive.

This error is the result of a fundamental challenge in how data is collected for online navigation and local search products: all of the major services use data that weren’t originally collected for navigation. The typical source is phone books listings, which were originally compiled by companies like InfoUSA to sell mailing lists. In this particular case, the national park likely has a business office in Downtown Seattle.

The data have a distinct bias: toward places with phone numbers. While you can get exact driving directions to a local ball bearing distributor, look for a park, landmark or trailhead and you’ll often get erroneous data or no results at all. Occasionally, you’ll luck out and there will be business names nearby that incorporate the place name.

Just for fun, try finding the Albert Einstein statue in Washington, DC using an online mapping service. (If you can’t find it, click on the image to see the answer.)

On Sunday, I was looking for Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park. Yahoo! Maps struck out entirely. Mapquest delivered a bunch of unrelated results.

An answer lies in another Yahoo! property: flickr’s database of geotagged photos. Although flickr’s search tools aren’t optimized for local search, it’s content is a great data source. The first search result in Google Maps for Hippie Hill is spot on; it came from Google indexing flickr’s geodata. The commercial results on the same map (the red markers) are mostly garbage.

Flickr is just one tool. As more people adopt GPS-enabled phones like the iPhone, we’ll see more and more user generated data. Enabling mobile data collection is reason enough to build an iPhone app.

Developing countries have the potential to leapfrog the developed world in data quality. Google’s Map Maker allows anyone to populate data in countries without large commercial data providers. You can pull up a satellite view and trace roads. Zoom into buildings and add local businesses. Find a park and add in key features. Because the content is user generated, the places that people look for the most will be added first, as opposed to the local ball bearing distributor. Places with colloquial names will become findable.

User-generated content has its challenges, of course. In the initial stages, tools like Map Maker will attract the community organizers who are passionate about their neighborhoods. Once the data start getting even modest usage, spammers will attack. But many of the standard spam fighting techniques can be used to deter them.

OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia offer similar functionality. OpenStreetMap is focused on creating and editing roads; Wikimapia is focused on places of interest.

Google Map Maker’s user interface is more intuitive than OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia. Unfortunately, Google is being hypocritical in how it treats the data. While Google Maps combines data from other sources, such as indexing geodata from flickr,  it is keeping content generated by Map Maker users locked up. Users can’t even download the data they create.

More on: geotagging, local search, maps

Where in the world is Georgia?

In this case, reported by Valleywag, Google is comically wrong. But even when Google is roughly right, the map is often there just for the sake of having a map. The location information is often not very precise or isn’t really relevant.

For example, this story about a Yankees game puts Yankee Stadium somewhere near City Hall. Stories about national issues are often datelined New York or Washington because the reporter happens to be sitting in one of those two cities.

For individual story pages, an inaccurate map isn’t the worst thing in the world. But when you plot many of these stories on a map, they become worthless. In Google Earth, you can get a layer that provides geotagged news from The New York Times. I’ve seen pointless geotagging such as a story titled “U.S. Moves Toward International Accounting Rule” geotagged as being in the “USA”. (Which Google Earth plots in Oklahoma.)

There are many cases where geocoding makes sense and provides users a real service:

• Restaurant reviews
• Crime stories
• Event listings
• Travel stories

In each of these cases, the location is a critical part of the story. The minimal extra effort involved in geotagging these stories would significantly increase their shelf life and usability.

I was deciding whether to head out to the Beach Chalet, a microbrewery and restaurant on the Pacific Ocean, on Sunday. They’ve got a great back yard with Adirondack chairs and live music. It’s a gorgeous place — on a sunny day. Unfortunately, it’s located in one of the foggiest parts of San Francisco.

Before trekking all the way to the other side of the city I wanted to know whether it was sunny there. Could social networking help?

I decided to post the question — to noone in particular — on Twitter:

Within 10 minutes, I had my answer:

Of course, this particular experiment is likely only to work this well this quickly in the Bay Area, where it’s easier to find a Twitter user than a newspaper reader.

How else could I find the answer? Google now has geo-coded Webcams in Google Earth. Find where you want to be and check to see if there’s a camera. Click and you’ll get your answer. In the case of the Beach Chalet, it’s often this:

The tours can be exported as a video file and uploaded to a video sharing site (as above) or shared by link to Live Search Maps. Like many such links on AJAX sites, it doesn’t preserve the correct state. Click “Tour in 3D” in the upper left and “aerial” above the map for best effect.

Tours can be created manually by pushing pins into a map. The service also plays nicely with GeoRSS, GPX, KML or KMZ files. The above tour was imported from my flickr pictures. (Unfortunately, flickr caps geo exports to the most recent 20 pictures per search.)

The 3d map tours can be generated from GPS tracklogs. Here’s a tour based on the tracklog from a recent bike trip through San Francisco, taking the ferry back from Sausalito:

Major cities, like San Francisco, benefit from 3D models of key buildings. The blue line in the video is the tracklog.

Both of these tours were created using the default settings. You can also customize the view shown at each location by rotating, tilting or zooming. I don’t see an option to playback the full tracklog.

Disclosure: I work for a Microsoft subsidiary.

• Wall St. Journal Makes Politics Its Business (Washington Post) – Media critic Howard Kurtz takes an in-depth look at changes at the Wall Street Journal since its takeover by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The biggest change is the increase in political coverage amid one of the most interesting political campaigns in recent history. The Journal, a rarity among newspapers, is increasing its news hole thanks to its new benefactor. via Howard Kurtz
• Steered Wrong: Drivers Trust GPS Even to a Fault (WSJ) – For all their convenience, portable navigation devices and online mapping still have one big problem: the world’s road network is constantly changing and digital mappers can’t keep pace. Some countries in Europe even have signs at tricky intersections telling drivers to ignore their GPS’ instructions. Yet many drivers put their faith in technology and blindly follow their GPS’ instructions. Perhaps this is because their accuracy is oversold; a TomTom TV ad (see below) shows a couple driving across a bridge during the ribbon cutting ceremony. The typical map on a PND is a year old the day you take it out of the box. via Doris Truong
• Eating away the innings in baseball’s cheap seat (USA Today) – What’s more American than baseball and Cracker Jacks? Possibly stuffing yourself silly. Faced with anemic attendance, some teams have come up with a new way to generate revenue: all-you-can-eat sections where you can eat all the hot dogs, french fries and soda you can stomach. At the Braves’ Turner field, the “typical all-you-can-eat customer downed: 3.35 hot dogs; one 20-ounce soda; one 7.9-ounce bag of peanuts; one 3-ounce order of nachos and 32 ounces of popcorn.” In unrelated news, the average seat at the Mets’ new Citi Field is 21 inches wide, 2 inches wider than those at Shea.
• IRS making sure your rebate gets spent (Marketplace) – One of the big concerns about the “economic stimulus” package is that people will do something silly with it — like save it or use it to pay down debt. I suggested that the rebates be issued as VISA debit cards. Apparently the IRS is using lifestyle analysis to determine what taxpayers want and spending their $600 rebate checks for them. One couple received an air conditioner instead of the check they were expecting.

It’s the first true two-way connected PND on the market, using cellular data for search, traffic and community features. Because I now work on automotive products, I’ll pass on reviewing it. The initial coverage from Walt Mossberg and The Washington Post are very positive. The Post story also goes into depth on how traffic services work.

• Dash’s Car Navigator Gives Smart Directions, If Others Participate (Mossberg)
• Beating Traffic By Joining the Network (Post)

Creative Commons image from flickr user listentoreason.

Google’s LatLong blog reports that The Ledger in Florida has published a Google My Map of Christmas lights in and around Lakeland, Fla. It’s great that newspapers are finally starting to use open Internet tools to help tell the story. I’ve written before about how news outlets used My Maps during the California wildfires.

It would’ve been nicer if The Ledger included pictures. Instead, they have descriptions like this:

North Pole scene with polar bears and igloos; forest scene with 15 lighted trees, Santas and deer; inflatable snow family; inflatable Santa; two Santas in sleigh with reindeer; nativity scene with shepherd, angels and wise men; Santa and Mrs. Claus and elves; candy canes and lollipops, 12 lighted trees; lighted deer; holographic snow family; wreaths; stars; lighted arches; eight-foot lighted star.

How many times does the “picture is worth a thousand words” have to be repeated for it to stick? Kudos to The Ledger, however, for allowing users to edit the map by adding their own favorite light displays.

Now if you had a Dash, you’d be able to see the map of light displays as you’re driving around.

More on: Google, maps, newspapers

Unlike typical GPS devices, Dash is connected to the Internet via either a GPRS cellular connection or WiFi. (Some high end TomToms, like my new TomTom 920, can be paired with Bluetooth cell phones and use their data connections.)

Among the features this two-way connectivity enables:

• More up-to-date content. You don’t have to worry about updating map and point of interest data; it happens automatically. Dash uses Yahoo! Search to find points of interest.
• Additional content types. Want to see where the best Christmas lights are or what’s happening around town? The real-time connectivity allows you to search for the latest information. In theory, you’d be able to pull up images of your destination from flickr or Google’s Street View. Want to know how much that home you just drove by goes for? Pull up Zillow. Dash will offer support for GeoRSS and KML, making it easy for third-parties to provide content.
• Live traffic. Dash uses other Dash units to help you determine what your commute will be like. Each Dash out there serves as a traffic probe.
• Send-to-car. Send destinations to your car from your PC. I was driving the other day to meet my brother and he called to say he had moved since I last talked to him. I had to pull over to re-program the GPS. With Dash, he could have sent a new destination to my car.
• See where your friends are. Although I don’t see this in the specs, a connected GPS could be used to show you where your friends are. (TomTom offers a similar feature.)

One way to think of Dash is as a location-enabled, mobile-optimized Web browser.

The biggest challenge Dash faces is pricing. All of these features and connectivity don’t come cheap. Prices on basic GPS units have almost fallen into the stocking stuffer category, with many units at $150 to $200.

Dash seems to be missing many of the features found in high-end ($400-$600) PNDs: Bluetooth hands-free calling, MP3 player, voice recognition and a picture viewer.

Dash retails for $600. In order to use the advanced features described above, you have to pay a monthly fee of $12.99. It’s $9.99/month if you prepay for two years, making the cost about $840. You won’t see that in many stockings.

More on: gps, satellite navigation