Wednesday, November 26. 2008

Huge Savings on In-house GIS

"Creating the system in-house saved the county about $2 million, [Anoka County GIS coordinator John] Slusarczyk said. Completing a digital annotation layer to the system saved the county $1.4 million, he said."

- Star-Tribune

MapQuest Positions itself Against Google Maps

"Google Maps may be gaining ground in terms of unique visitors but our user engagement and value proposition is very different than Google Maps. Visitors to MapQuest are far more engaged as we are actually a destination website."

That's Mark Law, Vice President of Product Development at Mapquest in an interview at Search Engine Land. While he and and Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President & General Manager, do their best to draw the lines between the offerings, I think users are seeing things in a bit more blurred way.

Much Ado About Pegman

Hey, if folks like a little animated man to help them use Google's StreetView, that's fine. Alas, a different interface innovation is getting short shrift: access to "report a concern." Says a commenter on VentureBeat:

The 'report a concern' link is now directly at the bottom of the Street View. Before you had to click help and find the link in the information window that opened.

That true - but it's a sort of "watermark" like the (c)Google 2008 beside it, so you'd likely not know it's there, unless you read this post. I hope others will help spread the word on this interface change and perhaps encourage Google to make it a bit more visible.