Blog Archives

Save and Share Google Maps Directions with My Maps [UltraNewb]

Posted on April 23, 2009
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The My Maps feature of Google Maps has been around for quite sometime, but if you are a regular Google Map user and you’re not using it to share common directions, it’s worth it.

The Google LatLong blog (Google's official blog for all things Google Earth and Maps) has a simple beginner's tutorial for using the My Maps feature to customize and save directions—complete with notes—so you've got a repository of common directions with helpful annotation.

As I said, this isn’t a new feature by any means, but it’s something that I’ve used several times here at Lifehacker (see the embedded map) and to share directions with friends and family. If you’ve used My Maps, let’s hear what you’re using it for in the comments.





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Yard Sale Treasure Map Plots Out Your Weekend Plundering [Sales]

Posted on April 11, 2009
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Yard Sale Treasure Map is a Google Maps mashup designed to help you find and easily get to Craigslist-posted yard sales in your area.

You enter a starting address, a driving radius, and select from Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Yard Sale Treasure Map then queries Craiglist for your area, and returns a route that will take you to all the yard sales it finds. You can click on the markers for each sale to see additional information about the sale and delete them if you’re not interested. You can also add in sales that you find from other sources, like your local paper, by either putting the address in the left sidebar or double clicking on the map to place a new marker. This surprisingly elegant hack is free to use.





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PropertyShark Dishes the Dirt on Your Future Home [Real Estate]

Posted on February 18, 2009
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PropertyShark is an astoundingly detailed real estate search engine. By aggregating public records, it provides an in-depth look at individual homes, and the real deal on your potential new neighborhood.

Enter an address into one of the markets currently covered by PropertyShark—it's unfortunately a little coast-centric at the moment, without much middle-of-the-country coverage. If PropertyShark can access the direct records of the property it will do so; if not, you get a summary of the surrounding area using a nearest-neighbor system. You can review a dizzying amount of information, like the current owners, most recent sale, sales history, assessments, and taxes. There are multiple maps that show how the building you searched for stacks up against the surrounding area, how tall surrounding buildings are, how frequently buildings have been sold, and much more. You can also review charts of the neighborhood with all kinds of breakdowns, such as percentage of households with families and age distributions.

PropertyShark is a handy tool for getting a feel for the neighborhood before investing the time and footwork into actually visiting it. It’s a free service, based on public records.






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Dynastree Maps Your Last Name [Family Tree]

Posted on February 2, 2009
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Web site Dynastree’s surname map lays out how people with your last name are distributed across the US (along with Canada and Germany).

The search tool is a breeze to use. Just enter your last name, hit Search, and Dynastree returns a very simple heatmap displaying the distribution of your last name across the United States. The map defaults to a view of your surname’s absolute distribution, but you can toggle the map to show relative distribution and get a better idea of the per capita distribution as well.

Dynastree’s surname map is just a small feature of the service, which is actually a family tree webapp. In fact, we highlighted Dynastree last year when it was called ItsOurTree. The distribution map appears to be accurate from what I know of folks sharing my last name, and it’s a great tool to help you understand the movements of your people.

Surname Map [Dynastree via CNET]






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Google Earth 5.0 Beta Released, Looks Incredible [Downloads]

Posted on February 2, 2009
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Windows/Mac/Linux: Google’s 3D mapping application Google Earth has just released version 5.0, adding historical imagery, maps of the ocean’s floor, and even better features for touring the world from your desktop.

The demo video pretty much says it all. The historic imagery lets you go back in time to see how the location you’re viewing has changed over the years. For the cubicle-based deep sea explorers, the new ocean features integrate maps of the ocean’s floor along with videos from National Geographic with Google Earth. Finally, if you’ve ever wanted to record a custom tour, a new record feature makes it easy to create and save tours of the globe. Looking good, GOOG.






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