Defeating Snowmageddon with Google Maps

Mapping the Storm Clean-up

New York radio station WNYC has created a Google Map for listeners to share whether their streets have been snow ploughed or not. The resulting map shows at a glance which streets have been ploughed and which are still unploughed.

The purple map markers indicate streets and neighborhoods that have been ploughed and the white markers show roads still covered by snow. You can contribute to the information displayed on the map by texting PLOW to 30644.

Snowmageddon Cleanup - New York

Ryan Ozimek, of PICnet, has used the crowdsourcing mapping tool Ushahidi to create two maps to help clean-up after the US snow storms.

Snowmageddon Cleanup - New York and Snowmageddon Cleanup - Bostonboth allow anyone to report problems, offer help or find help to problems created by the recent snow.

So if you willing to help your fellow neighbor dig out a car, shovel a sidewalk or salt a driveway you can advertise your services on these Google Maps. Conversely if you need a little help with your snow clean-up you can ask for your neigbors' help but adding a report to the relevant map.

Via: ReadWriteWeb

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Instant Street View Postcards

ShowMyStreet

This handy Google Maps application is just what you need if you want to share the Street View image of a location with your friends.

ShowMyStreet uses instant search to portray the Street View of a typed location. Like Google's Instant Search ShowMyStreet predicts as you type to show you the Street View of the current best guess. For example, if you want the Street View of Mission Street in San Francisco, the suggested locations go through a few permutations (e.g. Mission Viejo) until ShowMyStreet guesses correctly at 'Mission S'.

Once you have the correct Street View you can then share the location via Twitter and Facebook or e-mail the short URL. If a Street View isn't available for your current location you can share the satellite image of the location instead.

I can see myself using this map quite a bit from my mobile phone to share the Street View of my current location with friends.

Also See

Google Maps - From 0 to Instant - a Google Map with instant search.