Jason Lee Miller at WebProNews reviews Hitwise's latest stats on the MapQuest vs. Google Maps battle. In short, Google Maps is catching up, if slowly. One stat:

"This [Google Maps up 7%] throttled down MapQuest's lead over Google Maps significantly, falling from 429 percent more visits a year ago to just 126 percent more visits.

Still, MapQuest has more than 50% of mapping hits to Google's 22% and Yahoo's 13% (and dropping).

Heather Hopkins VP at Hitwise offers that "Google's aggressive promotion of Google Maps – search result embeds and sponsored search results have helped drive the spike in traffic." I'd tend to agree if only because there's suprising little "coverage" of Google Maps in the press. Google Earth? Yes. Google Maps? Not so much as shown by mailing daily explorations.

There was 5% dip in the number of U.S.-based Web searches from October, according to the latest comScore qSearch analysis. Now, November does have one less day than October, and nearly all the big players showed it ( with Yahoo showing a 7% drop, one that's hard to explain based on a single day off. But the rankings are the same: Google 59%, Yahoo 23% and Microsoft 10%. Ask and AOL round out the pack. AOL's MapQuest numbers dropped 17%, even with Thanksgiving a big driving holiday in the month.

- MediaPost
- raw data from comscore

The project gets its due from the Candian paper.

Of note:

-MapQuest is not worried:

"It's encouraging to see geography and location technology becoming so mainstream and part of people's lives," said Christian Dwyer, vice-president of Operations at MapQuest, a division of AOL LLC.

- It's taking a queue from OSM:

But it doesn't mean MapQuest and others can't learn a thing or two from OSM, and they have. MapQuest will soon let users correct its maps if they see a mistake, like a misnamed street.

"Julien's method is so complete, and his players so adherent to the defensive mind-set, that opposing teams soon will have to Google "Mapquest" directions to find the Boston net."

- Kevin Paul Dupont, writing in the Boston Globe about the Boston Bruin's coach, Claude Juien, and his method of obscuring the net in a game against the Blue Jackets. The Blue Jackets for other non-hockey fans, are from Columbus, Ohio. And, no I didn't "Google Mapquest" to find that out; I just Googled.

This week we tackle a question that came up in our work recently: Just what constitutes a "location-based service." The topic emerged as we discussed which posts here at APB should be tagged "LBS." In this podcast we tease out our own definitions and explore the future of the term. We apologize for the less than optimal sound quality; we hope the content is worth the effort. The podcast is 16 minutes long and was recorded on November 19, 2007.

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John Quain asks in this Sunday's Times: "IN a world where portable G.P.S. navigation devices cost less than $200 and free mapping software from Google, Microsoft and AOL is available online, is there any reason to buy a trip-planning program for your computer?" His answer is no. He concludes that Microsoft’s Streets & Trips 2008 and DeLorme’s Street Atlas USA 2008 are no longer needed in the face of PNDs from Garmin, TomTom and Magellan. His reason does not have to do with funcationality, but the practical matter of seeing the screen on a dash mounted display vs. an "on seat" laptop.