One For Truth

Wikimapia: Another Reason Why I Love the Freaking Internet

I love the internet. It's the autodidact's wet dream: information and knowledge at your fingertips, increasingly from wherever you are. Just in the last few weeks the internet has been integrated into how I do my job to a degree that it never had before; most of what I used to have to go to a customer's site to do I can now accomplish using Google Earth Pro. And I can even use the satellite images on Google Maps on my phone to be looking at a customer's site while I'm on the road (not driving, of course). And those of you who read this blog already know how I value and use Wikipedia on a regular basis.

And then today (via this article on digg.com--another daily resource for me), I find out that Wikimapia, a phenomenon I'd never even heard of before, reached a milestone 1,000,000 locations logged by its worldwide user base. In Wikimapia, users identify and describe locations of interest like parks, airports, restaurants, curiosities, you name it. Some people call out "this is where I live"--lame, who cares--but there's some offbeat notations that really bring out the human character of this venture.

Take the Main Street area of Huntington Beach, CA (not far from where I live). A block or two up from PCH, past the surf shop's and Perq's Bar, is a little notation pointing out where the "Fat Guy with a Guitar" usually plays. Click on the link and the logger explains, "Usually there's some fat guy standing out here with a guitar," then goes on to talk about what kind of music he plays and how he shouldn't be teased because he's trying to bring some culture to the staid O.C..

People from all around the world are kicking in. Check out the Chernobyl notes. If you go just to the northwest of the power plant you can see the ghost town of Pripyat, where many of the plant workers and engineers lived. Nobody lives there now.

I started logging some local establishments just for fun. As this tool grows in use, I can forsee it being very useful to just about everybody: businesspeople, travelers, shoppers... you name it. Especially those of us who just love to explore from our browsers.

The internet. Daddy like.

posted by Zeke @ 10:42 AM