Blogmap

I’ve been doing some research into the MapPoint web service recently, including attending a webcast on the subject. The service itself looks quite impressive, but I’m not sure how the fees would stack up. For a commercial organisation, you could produce some seriously impressive integrated applications – the example from the webcast was for a claims adjuster application that would obtain the agent’s scheduled calls for the day from the company web service, then obtain directions from the MapPoint web service and display them in an AutoRoute style. Cool demo, and I can think of lots of uses for a similar application.

Services like this aren’t free, and that’s a reality you have to face if you want quality of data. Although there will be ‘free’ efforts out there (Jono wrote about OpenStreetmap a while ago but I’m not sure how they’re getting on) I can’t imagine them being able to produce the same quality of data in the foreseeable future. Mapping costs large amounts of money, and even services like MapPoint and Google Maps (which is a damn cool application by the way) license their maps from mapping companies.

We’ll just have wait and see if Google opens up and API for their map service, but as they’re re-distributing other peoples content rather than their own it’ll be interesting to see how they make it pay.

Blogmap

Via. Jamie Cansdale

The map shown above is generated by Blogmap, and shows the ‘home’ of this site. Blogmaps is (obviously) built on top of MapPoint, and demonstrates the power (and flexibility) of the service. It looks like it could be a fun service if enough people register with it, especially the ‘Local Blogroll’ feature.

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