ReadWriteWeb

I recently interviewed Curtiss Pope, Founder and CEO of AisleFinder, a company that makes the signs at the top of each aisle in the supermarket irrelevant. With applications available for iOS, and now Android, and a database of over 3,000 stores and 150,000 products in the U.S., the "Google Maps of Supermarkets," as its founder calls it, saves time, and in the blisteringly fast app market, provides a service that hasn't been done before - or at least not properly.

During our interview, we spoke about his experience with the NewMe Accelerator, building a start-up in Silicon Valley as an African-American, the Michael Arrington/Soledad O'Brien situation, and how AisleFinder came to be.

In the wake of U.S. President Obama's speech on jobs last night, we present this mapping of Recovery Act spending. Development Seed, the same folks who mapped the famine in the Horn of Africa, have turned their attention on America.

Development Seed has mapped Recovery Act spending on a county-by-county basis and compared it with county unemployment figures over the same time period. So, does government spending have a positive effect in job recovery? That would be telling and we're going to abide by the doctor's prescription not to tell when you can show. The map is after the jump.

How do the Web, imaging, computer graphics and other technologies of the imagination change our understanding of, and even the images we attach to, the cities in which we live? I think at its best the new tech gives us a sense of flow, of how we got here from there, and how close (and how distant) the two points are. That certainly seems to be the case with this experiment in historical imaging from the Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Here Professor Dan Bailey and his crew have created Visualizing Early Washington D.C., a project to use today's technology to recreate yesterday's national capital. It was inspired by a request from PBS to create a 3D version of Capitol Hill for a documentary on the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. But it has grown over four years into a project to map the entire city, from 1790 to 1820.

Google Map Maker opened up to U.S. users today, allowing anyone to submit updates, revisions and additional information to the company's online mapping service. The tool was originally designed for users in other countries without access to the mapping resources we have stateside. Says Google, prior to the launch of Map Maker, only 15% of the world's population had detailed access to online maps of their neighborhoods, but now, citizen cartographers in 183 countries and regions have created maps of the places they live. Today, 30% of users people worldwide have access to online maps, thanks to Map Maker.

Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.

On Jan. 12, 2010 an earthquake of catastrophic proportions struck Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. Among the buildings that were leveled was a school. In spite of the roof caving into the classroom, some of the children survived and one of them managed to send an SMS message. Relief workers, however, were unable to find the location of the school. Volunteers in Boston with Ushahidi were able to locate the source of the text message and sent that information back to the relief workers, who rescued the children.

This rescue was possible only due to the use of disruptive, community-driven Web 2.0 technology by volunteer and technical communities (VTCs) working on disaster and conflict management. VTCs such as OpenStreetMap, CrisisMappers, Crisis Commons, Sahana and Ushahidi have contributed greatly to disaster management. VTCs have used SMS, social media and satellite imagery; built communities around humanitarian efforts; and created technology tools and wikis, using open source software, hardware and platforms, as well as free cloud based services in affected countries such as Haiti, Libya and Japan.

Despite their successes, it has not been an easy ride.

Global collaborative mapping platform OpenStreetMap launched a beautiful new map editing interface today. Called Potlatch 2, the tool is the fruit of several years of development and is a big improvement in speed, responsiveness and flexibility.

OpenStreetMap is a great way to learn about the nooks and the crannies, the hills, valleys, parks, paths, monuments, parks, businesses, neighborhoods and more in your own home town or exotic places far away. It's like the Wikipedia of world in local maps, but to date, it's been a little challenging to fill up with rich edits. The improved WYSIWYG interface, vector background layers and improved undo function of Potlach 2 should make the service even more enjoyable to edit. The barrier to getting started is now even lower.

Ah, the frustrations of trying to access a map on your phone when you've got limited Internet connection. Well now you needn't worry with ForeverMap.

Google gets a lot of kudos (and, okay, triggers a fair amount of concern) about its mapping efforts with Google Maps and Google Street View. But even with innovations to the vehicles that Google is using to capture the data - tricycles, for example, not cars - it's just not feasible to map everything.

There are alternatives to Google Maps, of course, and one of my favorites is OpenStreetMap, a collaborative map-making effort that allows people to correct and add information to maps. With a wiki-like process, OpenStreetMap, users can create and edit a map as a "living document," often including much better local information.

GLOBE at Night is aggregating public measurements of the night sky (or lack thereof) from March 22 through April 6 in the Northern Hemisphere and March 24 through April 6 in the Southern. This is the sixth year the group has used you all to map the encroaching light pollution in the world.

Using a web app that is provided online, participants are asked to attempt to identify certain constellations and, if they can, rate them against magnitude charts. The project tracks the increasing problem of disappearing darkness, which can interrupt the cycles of plant and animal life, eventually to a fatal degree.

If you like the idea of a quilting bee but prefer your bits electronic instead of fabric, you might be interested in a "ladies mapping party." 70 Kenyan women were, and showed up to a Google-sponsored ladies mapping party at Nairobi's iHub in February.

The women used Google Map Maker, and their specific local knowledge, to fill in schools, health centers, market centers, community development projects, restaurants and roads in a country too often neglected by cartographers.

Most people who aren't coin queens don't realize how important the little bits of bronze, silver and gold are to understanding our history. The American Numismatic Society's resident geek Ethan Gruber does. So he and the ANS are building a mapping interface for their huge numismatic data set.

"Such a large collection of digital objects lends itself to the potential for meaningful quantitative analysis, including the geographical distribution of coins based on a variety of physical and categorical attributes...Dynamic visualization based on researchers' queries can lead to hypotheses that would have otherwise never been considered."