Historypin is some sort of timetravel device. You can now look up historical imagery inside a Google Maps interface using historypin. I think its cool to see how your town looked like in the old days, maybe before you were even born. See those old horse trams riding down the streets before Prius’ were dominating the road.

Historypin shows how street view can be used in alternate ways. Add your own imagery and share it with the world. Help historypin become the largest database of historical data.
I love to see how this program works out and how soon the netherlands will be mapped with historical images. I bet my parents have some real old pictures kept in a box somewhere. Let’s take the trip down memory lane and start uploading those images.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Travel through London’s past with Historypin (google-latlong.blogspot.com)

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Historypin: building largest historical image archive

Yes! Finally, almost half of the Netherlands is now covered in Street View, including some parts of the city where I live, Zwolle. This is what the LatLong blog reported yesterday. More Street View cities have become available in the Netherlands and Spain. Apart from that Google also announced that Street View imagery is now available in Hawaii!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

More Street View in more Countries

Google Maps has just announced that they launched a beta verison of Turn by Turn navigation software for the Android 2.0 platform!

Features highlighted are :

• Search in plain English
• Search by Voice
• Traffic view
• Search along route
• Satellite view
• Street View
• Car dock mode

The first phone to be supporting the application will be the motorola droid. More info in the video!

via: mashable

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Maps Turn-by-Turn navigation for android 2.0

Google has added extra visuals in the map data to show where specific points of interests and landmarks are. Libraries, museums, pharmacies, restaurants, shops and all kinds of other places are now easily recognizable by embedded visuals in map data.
A negative side-effect of the feature is that a map can get a bit crowded. Big markers, small markers, points of interests, public transportation items..Although usefull many of the times, they all seem to clutter op the map more and more.
To me the interesting part is how a specific place is being interpreted as a relevant Point of Interest and how to get yourself a nice visual embedded in that map data.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Maps visuals added

The Google Maps team on twitter just notified their followers that they were handing out these:

Paper Google Maps with Public Transport information on the back.

It appears that this also must be an addition to the marketing campaign they are running for Google Maps as a product.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Paper Google Maps handed out by volunteers

It has been a while since we have seen some major interface changes to Google Maps. Today I noticed some of the following changes and wondered for how long they have already been there.

update: i was a bit behind on my reader and noticed Matt posted about this on SEL as well

I did some searches for company names inside Google Maps and found out that google was saving my previous searches and storing the markers in seperate colors inside a new part of the interface (something they call the rv_panel / revision panel?) as the screenshots below will show.

Apart from this I also noticed a ‘zoom level specifier’ in text-view mode but was unable to reproduce it in order to make a screenshot. The ‘zoom level specifier’ was shown alongside the small map in textview and  had numeric values of the zoomlevel with labels ‘street’, ‘place’ , etc to identify its zoom level depth. Let me know if some of you people have seen this experiment and please send me a screenshot

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Recent interface changes to Google Maps

Google has put up a list of all their geo related twitter accounts and this is something I wanted to share with you in case you haven’t read it already.

twitter.com/GoogleMaps
twitter.com/GoogleEarth
twitter.com/EarthOutreach
twitter.com/SketchUp
twitter.com/3DWH
twitter.com/Modelyourtown
twitter.com/GoogleSkyMap

The twitter accounts are pretty self explanatory.

BTW: remember you can follow me on twitter too! @martijnbeijk is where you will find my tweets.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google’s Geo related Twitter accounts

The Google team just announced that MyLocation, the feature we all know from the iphone Google Maps application will be available from our desktop if you run a supported browser. A blue dot will automatically appear when Google Maps is able to determine your location.

Supported browsers currently are:

• Google Chrome 2.0+ (using Gears),
• Mozilla FireFox 3.5+
• any browser with the latest version of Gears installed.

A step forward to bringing locally relevant results to your desktop!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

MyLocation coming to browser!

David Mihm has been showing off his whiteboard skills over at SEOmoz whiteboard friday. I really want to share these 2 video’s with my readers.

The first video is about Local Search Inclusion:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Local Search Inclusion with David Mihm

The second video is about SEO for Local Search

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Inclusion and SEO for Local Search video’s

This must be one of the biggest pieces for Local Search to read on this year (like last year). David Mihm published its Volume 2 of the Local Search Ranking Factors.

The general idea of the Local Search Ranking Factors is to give business owners a chance in understanding the things that matter to Local SEO. Even focusing on a few of the elements included in this huge research can have big effects for your online marketing strategy.
David’s quote:

It is my hope that this study will help small business owners confused by Local Search, or those strapped for time, to prioritize their marketing efforts.

The total research included almost 50 questions asked to 27 experts in the local search optimization field (I was lucky to participate, thx David!)

I recommend all my readers to go check it out, and join the conversation on David’s blog.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Ranking Factors 2009 are out!