Thursday, October 20. 2005

More Mashup Hype(?) from NY Times

The New York Times continues the hype of map mashups, touting (free registration may be required) Google Maps as the early winner. It doesn’t even mention Google Earth. It does highlight the challenge of finding the right mapshup for your purposes, though it lauds Google Maps Mania for its efforts. (Mike Pegg who runs it has offered tips to this blog and I hope I’ve reciprocated by sending material his way.) Maybe it's time for an index/catalog for map mashups?

We are to the point with the Web where if you think there should be a website for [insert idea here], there likely is, or should be one. I don’t believe I’ve found the map mashup index yet… I came up with this idea (that if you think there should be a book about something, there probably is) in high school. After a Shakespeare quiz, the kind where you have to identify the character who said a certain line, I went to the library to check my mostly guessed answers. I said to the reference librarian, “There’s a book that indexes all the words in the Bible. There should be one for Shakespeare.” To which she smiled and handed me the Concordance of Shakespeare. (Boy, did I think I was smart!) Well, the same should be true on the Web today. (Why then am I still waiting for a good index of geospatial data?)

Back to the article... One interesting tidbit: “Google's openness to the use of its maps does have limits, though. Once a mash-up turns into a large-scale commercial enterprise, Google looks to share in the revenue. That is happening at Trulia [yet another real estate site]; Google lawyers are trying to negotiate a royalty agreement. ‘At the moment it is free,’ Mr. Flint said, ‘and we are taking advantage of it.’” Will that insistence push developers to say, Virtual Earth?

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