google maps mashups

As if Google Maps weren't cool enough, Google Maps mashups are user-created overlays of Google Maps. For example, the DCist Map superimposes the Washington DC Metro map over the Google street/satellite/hybrid map of DC, which is so nice for planning to head downtown without a car. (I still carry a paper map book in my car though -- it beats the heck out of those horribly low-res printouts and inaccurate directions from all of the map/direction websites.)

On the way home last Friday, NPR featured a great story on these mashups, Tailor-Made Cartography with Google Maps. There's actually a blog, Google Maps Mania that tracks these mashups, including DC home prices, a US beer brewpub map, and an amazing amount of transportation maps, weather and earth maps, and current event maps.

This really is great -- Google Maps essentially enables people to visualize information easily by merging their data into a well-defined map interface. Compare this with how I perform a similar mapping task at work: hand-coding in C.