Some Friday Fun with Google Maps

Google MapMaker in Santiago
I love these timelapse videos by the Google MapMaker team. This one shows how the map of Santiago, Chile has grown through the help of the public using MapMaker.



Donate to OpenStreetMap
And because Google might have been inspired a little bit by OpenStreetMap during their conception of MapMaker it seems only fair to publicise OpenStreetMaps fundraising drive.

OpenStreetMap need £10,000 for a new database server. A new server is needed to keep up with the pace of OpenStreetMaps ever growing gang of mappers.

Pirate Bay Map

Pirate Bay, a Swedish website that indexes and tracks BitTorrent files, has created a Google Maps mashup of tracker connections per country. At the moment the map is quite simple but Pirate Bay plan to add more statistics, such as the type of BitTorrent clients people use, and the average download and upload speeds per region.

At the moment it is quite interesting just checking out which countries are downloading the most pirated software.

Via: Street View Gallery & TorrentFreak

Street Views of the Week
This mirror has caught the street view camera looking a little too closely at a shop called 'Fetish'.

Via: Google Street View Gallery

I'm not sure whether the street view car has found a portal to a parallel universe here or if this image just shows the street view car as it enters a time machine. Either way I think we should be told!

Via: Google Blogoscoped

Google Translates Map API Documentation
Google has translated the Google Maps API documentation into Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, German and Spanish. So I'm looking forward to a flurry of submissions from Brazil, Russia, Germany and Spain.

• http://code.google.com/intl/de/apis/maps/
• http://code.google.com/intl/es/apis/maps/
• http://code.google.com/intl/pt-BR/apis/maps/
• http://code.google.com/intl/ru/apis/maps/