icono-wha?

Schmap

I’m not quite sure what the “sch” represents in Schmap. Maybe a combination of “schweet” and “map”, or better yet, a little onomatopoeia (yes I had to look that one up), like the sound a map makes when you whack someone upside the head with it. Either way, they are quite the handy interactive maps.

I first heard about it when someone contacted me about using one of my photos from Flickr of the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland. The published version of the Portland map is above, and gives a nice overview of some of the scenic landmarks downtown, as well as some of the surrounding area. Users can create their own Schmaps using the free desktop tool. Schmaps can then be shared with others and displayed like widgets like the one above. The only real drag is that there are a very limited set of cities available for Schmapping, and sadly Anchorage is the only city available in Alaska. Hopefully, their list of cities grows.

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Fairbanksans Messing With Google’s Street View Cameras?

Google’s Street View cameras were allegedly sabotaged in our little town of Fairbanks, AK recently. While it is unclear the actual circumstances surrounding the incident, it is hysterical to think there is some group of clandestine Alaskans running around thwarting Google’s attempts to image the area.

Here’s a direct link to a Google map featuring a plastic bag.

[Spotted on BoingBoing]

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Using Atlas to Scout Ahead

This morning I received an email from FreshLogic Studios, and with all the online services and accounts I have I couldn’t quite remember why they were emailing me, so I went to their site to refresh my memory. A few months back I had come across their Atlas application that had a cool tie-in to Twitter so I created an account, voila… question answered.

It turns out Atlas has some other handy features that I hadn’t played with before. I’ll be traveling the next couple of weeks and took the opportunity to map some driving directions. Normally I would use Google Maps, am glad I tried this instead. (Attention terrorists) Below is the route I’ll be driving from Anchorage to Seward. It is a very scenic drive as you can probably guess from the map.

Next I grabbed the directions from PDX to a conference near Portland I’ll be at next week. This map isn’t quite as pretty as the first one.

… So I zoomed out to see what was nearby …

Still, I wondered what the area was like on the ground. Having never been to Portland yet I don’t know what quite to expect, so I see there are other features Atlas has that can help me discover more about the area such as “Bird’s Eye View”. Now I can see what areas of Portland really look like …at the University of Portland for instance…

… and the conference location …

Now how handy is that? How many times have I wished I knew where I was going before I got there? Atlas also shows images of the local area that other people have shared on Flickr. My next question is where all the hotspots are. Atlas can map those too courtesy of hotspothaven.com. Hey Look! There is that cool bookstore that Chris told me about that I will definitely stop at.

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