If you don’t already have Google Maps on your mobile phone, here’s another great reason to do so. Now you can get public transit schedules directly on the map itself. Need to find the closest metro stop? No problem. Mobile Google Maps now supports this information for over 50 cities world wide. Check out the video for more details.

The new version of Google Maps for mobile is available to download to your phone at http://www.google.com/gmm from your phone's web browser.

Tags: google maps, mashup

The folks at USC’s Interactive Media Division have got a cool project underway. Viewfinder. Their stated objective is "to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind" and specify that "a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute". If that still sounds like a bit like technical gobbley-goop, here is the idea: You take a picture of someone in front of a landmark. Now you want to superimpose that photo into a 3D world so that the image is perfectly aligned to the model.

Did that help? No??? OK, then watch their video (below) and you will get the idea immediately.

Tags: google, google earth, panoramic, usc, photooverlay, google maps, mashup, viewfinder

Click play to listen to Paranoid Rock by Go Home Productions

I dig on these mashups. If you haven't heard a mashup yet, you're in for a fun ride. To get a taste, hit play above and listen to Black Sabbath and Queen in a way you never have before.

This latest offering from Go Home Productions includes unique, never heard before mixes and mashes of the following artists: The Rolling Stones, The Temptations, The Sex Pistols, Ce Ce Peniston, The Stone Roses, Billy Joel, The Byrds, The Supremes, Keith Mansfield, The Beach Boys, The Cadbury's Fudge Advert, Carly Simon, Luther Vandross, REM, Nirvana, Alan Parker, Black Sabbath, Queen, T.Rex, The Commodores and Burt Bacharach. I must admit, that is the first time I have ever written "Burt Bacharach."

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Tags: mashup, music, dj

Flickr and the Library of Congress have teamed up to try and describe, tag, attribute as many photographs as possible currently held by the Library of Congress for which no known copyright holder exists. Read More...

Tags: flickr, library of congress, mashup

This is a very though provoking video. It's as much a brief lesson on Web 2.0 technologies -- among other things abstracting content from structure and repurposing content -- but it also is an interesting piece which gives you pause to the world we're creating with all of this information. Is copyright law relevant? Are we making too much information available? Not enough? What do you think?

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Tags: mashup, visualization

Another outstanding source of information. This time for the San Diego fires. This map comes courtesy of KPBS in San Diego. Click on the link below the map for a larger view of the map.


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Tags: fire, google, mashup, visualization, california, san diego county

One of the fires currently out of control in Southern California is about 5 miles directly north from our home. Called the Santiago Fire, it was started by an arsonist. The Orange County Register is maintaining an outstanding Google Map of the fire's progress. What's more, each of the points denoted on the map provides a wealth of information.


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Many thanks to the OC Register for maintaining this great source of information.

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Tags: fire, orange county, google, mashup, california

As a Southern California native, I have seen my share of fires, but this year is different. Every year it is the same week -- the week before Halloween. As of this writing, there are 16 major fires burning in Southern California, all fueled by some of the driest weather I can remember, coupled by 90+ degree temperatures and of course, very strong Santa Ana winds (in excess of 80 mph gusts in some areas).
The closest fire to us, the Santiago fire, is about 10 miles due north from us and was started yesterday early evening by an arsonist.

Below is a Google Map maintained by the Orange County of all the active fires.


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And after the jump (click "read more..." below), you can see an amazing image captured by a NASA satellite today of Southern California. Read More...

Tags: fire, google, mashup, visualization, nasa, california, orange county

This morning at exactly 4:30am, I awoke to find the house shaking. This is the second quake we've felt at our home in the last couple of weeks. It appears this morning's shake was a 3.7, while the last quake was a 4.7. As a Southern California native, earthquakes are nothing new. And to be honest, I find them interesting.



After being unable to get back to sleep, I figured I'd go check out the quake's epicenter and magnitude. The USGS has great map data for all quakes, including the "mashup" above.
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Tags: earthquake, mashup, google

In case you didn't read about it, a couple of months ago Google introduced a new capability to their Google Maps called Street View. In addition to viewing either satellite images, street map detail or street maps composited on top of the satellite images, now they have a view as though you are on street level. In the graphic below, you can see the corner of Park Avenue and PCH in Laguna Beach.



These Street View maps allow you to navigate down the street by clicking on the arrows in the photograph. What's more, you can pan around (left and right) within the image itself to gain a bit more immersive perspective on that particular location.
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Tags: panoramic, mashup

Web 2.0 apps aren't the only mashups in town. In fact, DJs have been mixing songs together for years. This started off innocently enough back in the 80s when club DJs would match the beats of one song, transitioning it into another.

Fast forward to the days folllowing the dot com bubble burst of the late 90s and DJs began to move match beating to a new level. Instead of simply producing a continuous stream of foot-tapping tunes, DJs began to sample clips from one song, insert them in to other tracks and effectively "mash" the two songs together. To illustrate this idea, Check out this clip from Mark Vidler of Go Home Productions (GHP) called Rapture Riders:



Click play to listen to Rapture Riders by Go Home Productions

Who would think Rapture by Blondie and Riders on the Storm by the Doors could sound so good together. And this is just a taste of the talent of GHP. This week, GHP released a downloadable album of 20 of the such tracks, aptly called This Was Pop 2002-2007.
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Tags: mashup, dj, music

I find mindmaps to be a great way to represent ideas, thoughts, action items. Particularly when the end point of the effort isn't exactly understood. Meaning, you have a lot of data to capture and document, but you aren't absolutely certain the relative association for each datapoint. Without getting to hung up on structure, a mindmap provides a great way to get your thoughts down, then as time progresses, one will begin to see patterns, even a taxonomy.

Over the last few years, I have continued to be amazed by some very creative methods people have employed to visualize data. A couple of my favorites are captured here...

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Tags: visualization, mindmap, mashup

And now for your viewing pleasure, I give you Orange County, California. OK, not the whole place, but at least a few notable locations such as: San Clemente Pier, Seal Beach Pier, Balboa Fun Zone in Newport Beach, Greeter's Corner in Laguna Beach, Cook's Corner biker bar in Trabuco Canyon and last but not least, the hills around my neighborhood after a pretty good sized fire came through the area.


Click the picture above to view the Orange County, California picture map.

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Tags: google, panoramic, photography, qtvr, mashup, orange county

With mashups continuing to be so popular, I have taken advantage of Google's recently announced capability for embedding Google My Maps into web pages. I've mashed-up some of my photography with Google Maps. Translation: Now you can see exactly where each of my photographs was taken. As of today, I have posted two Picture Maps of my photography: Paris / Loire Valley and Rome.
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Tags: photography, google, mashup

Pretty darn cool. Now in select cities (San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver) you can get a “street view” within Google Maps. So I did a search for Moscone Center, clicked on the “street view” button in the window and a new map marker that looks like a person landed on the page. Move the marker to where you want it, and voila a 360 panoramic image of that location pops up.



As you see above, the photograph is pretty darn good. And just like the 360 degree panoramic photos I take, you can click down in the photo and pan left and right to look around in these Google Maps images. Finally, you can also click on the arrows to move up or down the street.

Tags: technology, google, panoramic, mashup

Here are a bunch of interesting maps visually representing different socio economic information. In the case above, this is a map representing refined petroleum imports.

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Tags: mashup, visualization

Wow... so far this is the coolest thing I've seen so far. Overlaying data on the maps. And in this case, census and housing information. Type in a street address, then see the 1, 3 and 5 mile radius bands and the resulting data. Purty cool. Here is a link to the site to see sensus data Google mapped.

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Tags: mashup, google

Google Maps are cool. And now there are a lot of folks figuring out some cool stuff to do with the Google Map APIs. Above, is a Google Map with an overlay of where news events are taking place around the world... the news events courtesy of the BBC news feed.

Check out this "Google Map Mashups" blog to see all the different kind of information and map melding folks are putting together.

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Tags: google, mashup

In honor of the first moon landing that took place 36 years ago today, Google with a little help from the folks at NASA, have maps showing the landing spots for the six Apollo lunar landings. Oh, and be sure and zoom in, some geek humor will be found

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Tags: mashup, google