Happy Holidays Everyone

Pegman Decoration

Pegman, the Google Maps Street View character, has gone all festive. For the holidays Pegman has donned his Santa Claus hat.

On which note don't forget to track Santa Claus today with the NORAD Santa Tracker.



The Santa Tracker is now live and shows Santa's current position on a Google Map. This year NORAD have even added a Santa Cam to the map.

Track Santa's journey in Google Earth

By the time you read this, Santa will have already begun his journey around the world, starting around 2:00am EST today. His journey will be tracked using a variety of methods including satellites, radar and fighter jets.

You can view the main Santa tracker here, but read on for other ways to follow his journey throughout the day.

If you missed the chance to watch his journey last year, here is a highlight reel that Google has put together:

There are a lot of great ways to follow him on his journey, thanks to the folks at NORAD and some help from Google:

Watch his progress on Google Maps. Visit noradsanta.org to see a map of his location and his next scheduled stop.

• Watch him fly by using the Google Earth Plug-in. Visit the "Track in Google Earth" page to watch Santa fly by using the Google Earth Plug-in. Last year, I fired up this page on my netbook, placed it up on the mantle, and we kept a close eye on Santa all day long.

• Follow his progress on your phone. Search for [santa] in Google Maps for Mobile, or visitm.noradsanta.org from your phone to track his progress while you're on the go.

• Follow him on other services, such as his YouTube channel, Twitter account andFacebook Page.

As another fun bonus, Google has just added a Santa hat to "Pegman" (the Street View character) in Google Maps. He doesn't change the functionality of Google Maps at all, but just makes things a bit more festive!

Also, Google has built a variety of custom online holiday cards for you to send to your family and friends. You can see them all at googlemapsholidays.appspot.com. It uses a fun combination of winter images and Google Maps to create a fun card for you to send.

Pegmans Gets A Hat

Pegman gets a Christmas hat for the weekend?http://goo.gl/maps/jAgL

Predictions - 2011 will bring,

A new perspective to old fashioned raster maps... with the help of HTML5.

OpenStreetMap will go mainstream... more so than at present.

AddressPoint (UK Postal Address locations) become more accessible without huge costs.

Fusion Tables SPATIAL will improve vastly.

Best of 2010 mapping

Opendata from Ordnance Survey. (No April Fools there)

Ovi Maps downloads maps via wifi to phone (no more Ovi Suite!)

Bing Maps Apps more usable adding OpenStreetMap.

MapQuest pump $1million in Open Source Data.