thanking bernd koschland

Some days, I really love the internet. Today is one of those days.

A few years ago, I wrote about how the internet can be a wonderful source multiplier, and a way to connect the unconnectable after a photograph I posted provided answers for a daughter about what had become of her father.

Earlier this week, I heard a riveting story on the BBC world service while driving to work. It was the 75th anniversary of the day Bernd Koschland arrived in England. He was recounting his experience as one of 10,000 Jewish children sent to the UK during the Kindertransport for safekeeping on the eve of WWII.

Newshour: Remembering Kindertransport, a rescue mission for Jewish children before World War II

Just before the outbreak of the second world war in 1938, Britain opened its borders to approximately 10,000 Jewish children who were fleeing the Nazi regime in Austria and Germany, and later Poland and Czechoslovakia. Seventy five years ago, the first of those children arrived in what became known as Kindertransport. Newshour's Razia Iqbal spoke to Bernd Koschland, who aged 7, was put on the Kindertransport from Germany by his parents after Kristallnacht, the outbreak of mass violence against Jews and their businesses which led later to the Holocaust. He told her how he remembered that night ...

I was curious to learn more about the man, and to share the interview with friends via social media, so I set about finding him online. The BBC's web site didn't list his name or have a link to just the 10-minute interview. It took a few minutes of googling-- and getting the spelling of his full name (thanks, Twitter #Kindertransport)-- to find a video interview with Bernd and his sister Ruth. I then found his LinkedIn profile, which listed the schools he had attended. From there, it was easy to figure out which Facebook profile was the right Bernd Koschland.

I sent him the following message on Facebook, hoping to thank him for sharing his story, but never expected a response.

I heard your story on the BBC world service this morning and wanted to thank you for sharing it with the world. I'm a mother of 2 living in Connecticut and it touched me deeply to think about the choice your parents made and how you now live your life. Thank you!

This morning, I awoke to a gracious, humble, and thoughtful response.  The world needs more people like Bernd.  It also needs more people to do the right thing when we encounter injustice.

like i said ...

Via Casey

one world, different networks

The Who's Who of Social Networks Around the Globe Compiler from Wired.com
The French newspaper Le Monde has posted an interesting look at social network usage around the world. As you can see from the graphic above (click the image above for a larger version) MySpace dominates the U.S. and Australia, while Facebook holds the lead in Great Britain and Canada. And contrary to what you might think, Google's Orkut isn't as also-ran as some like to paint it — the site is popular in both Brazil and India.
Also worth noting is that, while interest in sites like LiveJournal and Friendster have waned in the U.S., both have found strong followings overseas — Russia and South Asia respectively.
French users remain obsessed with Skyblog, a social network and blogging platform that has long dominated the online space in France.
Via Neatorama, image from Le Monde

longing for the days of readers

I love the lede on this article and how 19th century cigar rollers made their lives less mindnumbing. But those are all tactics to make work more palatable. Nowadays, I listen to music while coding or writing when possible. I also have NPR, music, or an audio book on whenever I'm exercising or in the car for more than a few minutes. Each is a way to pass the time and focus less on the distasteful task at hand.

Technology Can Be a Blessing for Bored Workers
By NOAM COHEN
Published: February 18, 2008
OF all the repetitive, mind-numbing jobs in the late 19th century, cigar-rolling was special.

Unlike sewing clothes, mining coal or forging steel, it was blessedly quiet. And thus cigar workers, whether in Chicago or Havana, were the first ones in their time who managed to introduce that vital commodity — distraction — onto the work floor.

Using their own wages, and backed by a powerful union, they paid for a “reader” who sat in an elevated chair and began the morning with the news and political commentary. By the afternoon, he would usually have switched to a popular novel. The 100 or so rollers on the floor were his captive audience, listening as they worked.

Today, the outside world has managed to sneak into the workplace through personal music players and cellphones, not always with official consent. But discussion of the effects of technology on our working lives is almost always restricted to office workers, who often see cellphones and BlackBerrys as emblems of their busy lives.

For blue-collar workers in many occupations, however, cellphones and music players have also had profound effects — including escape from the tedium or the physical isolation of their jobs. Unlike white-collar workers, many of these workers face restrictions from employers or objections from customers.

New Yorkers like to complain about cabbies talking on cellphones, but they rarely ask themselves why someone driving a cab late at night far from home needs the phone in the first place.

Music helps many postal workers stay sharp during what is often repetitive work. Giselle E. Ambursley, part of a group of five or six who work on a mail-sorting machine at the Postal Service’s Morgan Processing and Distribution Center in Manhattan, said that on a typical day, “four out of five” listen to music. “It helps most of us get through the day.”

“I remember when I first got a Walkman,” she said. “I was excited, especially about using it at work. I bought tapes galore. I have thousands of dollars worth of tapes.” Ms. Ambursley, a shop steward in the American Postal Workers Union, now uses a Microsoft Zune and says she intends to convert those tapes into digital files for her player.

Cellphones are another matter. Cellphone conversations are not tolerated while working because supervisors see them as a distraction, Ms. Ambursley said, and when a call comes in, it can be returned only when off the floor. It is a shame, she said, because for night workers, the calls are often short — wishing a good night or helping with homework — and some people can easily use a hands-free cellphone while working. The time spent leaving the work floor is a waste, she said. “They keep bringing up safety, but I bring up productivity.”

David White, a freelance truck driver from Amherst, Mass., said his Treo 700 — a phone with an Internet connection — made the many days he spends away from home more comfortable. While he recognizes that truckers are not the stereotypical users of a Treo, he thinks they are ideal users. “Getting my Hotmail — now Yahoo mail — on my P.D.A., that made a world of difference,” he said. “It didn’t matter if I was living in a truck.”

His iPod is another critical gadget. He says he downloads audio books from Audible.com and listens to them through an adapter in the tape deck in his truck.

His job does have advantages, he says. “You’ve got no boss, no one bothering you. You just have to show up,” he said, but even so, “if I didn’t have the books, I couldn’t do it.”

Last Christmas season, however, he worked as a temporary employee for United Parcel Service, moving packages — but not making deliveries — and he found that the trucks had no tape decks. There were speakers, he said, and he saw that some full-time employees had rigged CD players and radios to connect to the speakers. He was leery, however, of using them without permission. He was left, he said, to listen to the G.P.S. road directions. “It was a little British voice,” he said. “Even that much was enough.”

Truckers and mail sorters have an advantage, however, that other workers do not: they largely do not deal with the public. Cab drivers, for example, are the most widely vilified users of cellphones in the workplace because they use them in front of customers. In New York, cabbies are not permitted to use cellphones while driving. The city has been sending undercover inspectors to ticket them.

Likewise, U.P.S. delivery drivers are not permitted to listen to music. Nor are trainees at the Ready, Willing and Able program in New York who clean the streets. The program’s spokesman said they “are learning how to be responsible workers, which includes balancing work and personal life.” He said they are highly visible, so “New Yorkers can see them on their cellphones or listening to music, as opposed to interacting with each other and the public.”

Biju Mathew, a professor of technology at Rider College who has been an advocate for taxi drivers, said cellphones have replaced the citizens’ band radio system. CB was “completely communal,” he said. With the arrival of cellphones, “it was broken down to a series of individual conversations,” he said. But with newer technology, he said, the drivers frequently speak in groups of 6 to 10 drivers in conference calls.

“They found that a single conversation is isolating, and they are back to communal discussions. They have readapted the technology.”

The cigar makers faced restrictions of their own. After a strike in 1931 in Tampa, Fla., failed, said Nancy Hewitt, a Rutgers history professor, the workers returned, but the factory owners had dismantled the readers’ chairs. “They replaced the readers with radios,” she said.

Over the next decade, industrial production came to the cigar factory and the radios were gone, too — no one could hear them over the noise.

tv b gone

I've gotta go for a test drive of this one with Bucky. If it gave me the power to just mute the TV that would work for me, too.

TV B Gone
I am really looking forward to the Super Bowl this year now that I have built up my TV B Gone kit. I ordered it from Make Magazine after eating one too many meals in restaurants with blaringly loud TVs. It is basically just a universal remote that turns off any television by cycling through all of the various manufacturer's OFF codes! I soldered it together this morning and am now trying to figure out how to fit it inside my old Nokia cellphone. The LEDs are infrared, so the only way I could check to see if they all worked was to look at it through the viewfinder of my camera. You can try that with your TV remotes; It is pretty cool! Now I'm off to the gym where I can test it on lots of TVs. I'm going to try to hit the sports bars tomorrow and see how well it works in the wild. Hopefully no one will notice why the TVs start turning off during exciting parts of the game.

taking a megabyte out of poverty

Babajob.com seems to embody what Muhammad Yunus meant when he called for social businesses. Kudos to Sean Blagsvedt.

In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Published: October 30, 2007

BANGALORE, India — Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, in India workmen like Mr. Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients’ computers.

So you can imagine Mr. Manohar’s wonder as he sat in a swiveling chair in front of a computer, dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Mr. Manohar’s page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on an Indian Web site called Babajob.com.

Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers — the world’s poor. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding poverty that surrounds them.

“In Redmond, you don’t see 7-year-olds begging on the street,” said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob’s founder, referring to Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington State, where he once worked. “In India, you can’t escape the feeling that you’re really lucky. So you ask, What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?”

Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive results for the poor, corporations have made India a laboratory for extending modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for instance, develops many of its ultralow-cost cellphones here. Citibank first experimented here with a special A.T.M. that recognizes thumbprints — to help slum dwellers who struggle with PINs. And Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global research group studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users. Babajob is a quintessential example of how the back-office operations in India have spawned poverty-inspired innovation.

The best-known networking sites in the industry connect computer-savvy elites to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects India’s elites to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can view Rajeev’s page, travel to the page of Rajeev’s chauffeur and see which of the chauffeur’s friends are looking for similar work.

Mr. Blagsvedt, now 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three years ago he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house policy research arm. The new team worked on many of the same complex problems as their peers in Redmond, but the employees here led very different lives outside the office than their counterparts in Redmond. They had servants and laborers. They read constant newspaper tales of undernourishment and illiteracy.

The company’s Indian employees were not seeing poverty for the first time, but they were now equipped with first-rate computing skills, and many felt newly empowered to help their society.

At the same time, Microsoft was plagued by widespread software piracy, which limited its revenue in India. Among other things, the company looked at low-income consumers as a vast and unexploited commercial opportunity, so it encouraged its engineers’ philanthropic urges.

Poverty became a major focus in Mr. Blagsvedt’s research office. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. In the course of that work, Mr. Blagsvedt stumbled upon an insight by a Duke University economist, Anirudh Krishna.

Mr. Krishna found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to find them. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.

Mr. Blagsvedt’s epiphany? “We need village LinkedIn!” he recalled saying, alluding to the professional networking site.

He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague built a social-networking site to connect Bangalore’s yuppies with its laborers. (The site, which Mr. Blagsvedt started this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore now, but he plans to spread it to other Indian cities and maybe globally.)

Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with computers. The wealthy potential employers would be reluctant to let random applicants tend their gardens or their newborns. To deal with the connectivity problem, Babajob pays anyone, from charities to Internet cafe owners, who finds job seekers and registers them online. (Babajob earns its keep from employers’ advertisements, diverting a portion of that to those who register job seekers.) And instead of creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the process by which Indians hire in real life: through chains of personal connections.

In India, a businessman looking for a chauffeur might ask his friend, who might ask his chauffeur. Such connections provide a kind of quality control. The friend’s chauffeur, for instance, will not recommend a hoodlum, for fear of losing his own job.

To re-create this dynamic online, Babajob pays people to be “connectors” between employer and employee. In the example above, the businessman’s friend and his chauffeur would each earn the equivalent of $2.50 if they connected the businessman with someone he liked.

The model is gaining attention, and praise. A Bangalore venture capitalist, when told of Babajob, immediately asked to be put in touch with Mr. Blagsvedt. And Steve Pogorzelski, president of the international division of Monster.com, the American jobs site, said, “Wow” when told of the company. “It is an important innovation because it opens up the marketplace to people of socioeconomic levels who may not have the widest array of jobs available to them.”

Mr. Krishna, the Duke economist, called it a “very significant innovation,” but he cautioned that the very poor might not belong to the social networks that would bring them to Babajob, even on the periphery.

In its first few months, the company has drummed up job seekers on its own, sending workers into the streets with fliers promising employment.

To find potential employers, in addition to counting on word of mouth among those desperate for maids and laborers, Babajob is also relying on Babalife, the company’s parallel social networking site for the yuppie elite. People listed on Babalife will automatically be on Babajob, too.

So far, more than 2,000 job seekers have registered. The listings are a portrait of India’s floating underclass, millions and millions seeking a few dollars a day to work as chauffeurs, nannies, gardeners, guards and receptionists.

A woman named Selvi Venkatesh was a typical job seeker. “I am really in need of a job as our residential building collapsed last month in Ejipura,” she said, referring to a building collapse that killed two people, including an infant, in late July, according to The Times of India.

In Mr. Blagsvedt’s apartment one morning, Mr. Manohar, the painter, professed hope.

He earns $100 a month. Jobs come irregularly, so he often spends up to three months of the year idle. Between jobs, he borrows from loan sharks to feed his wife and children. The usurers levy 10 percent monthly interest, enough to make a $100 loan a $314 debt in one year.

Mr. Manohar does not want his children to know his worries, or his life. He wants them to work in a nice office, so he spends nearly half his income on private schools for them. That is why he was at Babajob in a swiveling chair, staring at a computer and dreaming of more work.

hello darkness, my old friend

"If only ..." was my first thought. But knowing that a cell phone jammer could be used along with the commission of a violent crime gives me serious pause.

Devices Enforce Silence of Cellphones, Illegally
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: November 4, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2 — One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was “blabbing away” into her phone.

“She was using the word ‘like’ all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl,” said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.

Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer’s cellphone transmission — and any others in a 30-foot radius.

“She kept talking into her phone for about 30 seconds before she realized there was no one listening on the other end,” he said. His reaction when he first discovered he could wield such power? “Oh, holy moly! Deliverance.”

As cellphone use has skyrocketed, making it hard to avoid hearing half a conversation in many public places, a small but growing band of rebels is turning to a blunt countermeasure: the cellphone jammer, a gadget that renders nearby mobile devices impotent.

The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.

The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”

The jamming technology works by sending out a radio signal so powerful that phones are overwhelmed and cannot communicate with cell towers. The range varies from several feet to several yards, and the devices cost from $50 to several hundred dollars. Larger models can be left on to create a no-call zone.

Using the jammers is illegal in the United States. The radio frequencies used by cellphone carriers are protected, just like those used by television and radio broadcasters.

The Federal Communication Commission says people who use cellphone jammers could be fined up to $11,000 for a first offense. Its enforcement bureau has prosecuted a handful of American companies for distributing the gadgets — and it also pursues their users.

Investigators from the F.C.C. and Verizon Wireless visited an upscale restaurant in Maryland over the last year, the restaurant owner said. The owner, who declined to be named, said he bought a powerful jammer for $1,000 because he was tired of his employees focusing on their phones rather than customers.

“I told them: put away your phones, put away your phones, put away your phones,” he said. They ignored him.

The owner said the F.C.C. investigator hung around for a week, using special equipment designed to detect jammers. But the owner had turned his off.

The Verizon investigator was similarly unsuccessful. “He went to everyone in town and gave them his number and said if they were having trouble, they should call him right away,” the owner said. He said he has since stopped using the jammer.

Of course, it would be harder to detect the use of smaller battery-operated jammers like those used by disgruntled commuters.

An F.C.C. spokesman, Clyde Ensslin, declined to comment on the issue or the case in Maryland.

Cellphone carriers pay tens of billions of dollars to lease frequencies from the government with an understanding that others will not interfere with their signals. And there are other costs on top of that. Verizon Wireless, for example, spends $6.5 billion a year to build and maintain its network.

“It’s counterintuitive that when the demand is clear and strong from wireless consumers for improved cell coverage, that these kinds of devices are finding a market,” said Jeffrey Nelson, a Verizon spokesman. The carriers also raise a public safety issue: jammers could be used by criminals to stop people from communicating in an emergency.

In evidence of the intensifying debate over the devices, CTIA, the main cellular phone industry association, asked the F.C.C. on Friday to maintain the illegality of jamming and to continue to pursue violators. It said the move was a response to requests by two companies for permission to use jammers in specific situations, like in jails.

Individuals using jammers express some guilt about their sabotage, but some clearly have a prankster side, along with some mean-spirited cellphone schadenfreude. “Just watching those dumb teens at the mall get their calls dropped is worth it. Can you hear me now? NO! Good,” the purchaser of a jammer wrote last month in a review on a Web site called DealExtreme.

Gary, a therapist in Ohio who also declined to give his last name, citing the illegality of the devices, says jamming is necessary to do his job effectively. He runs group therapy sessions for sufferers of eating disorders. In one session, a woman’s confession was rudely interrupted.

“She was talking about sexual abuse,” Gary said. “Someone’s cellphone went off and they carried on a conversation.”

“There’s no etiquette,” he said. “It’s a pandemic.”

Gary said phone calls interrupted therapy all the time, despite a no-phones policy. Four months ago, he paid $200 for a jammer, which he placed surreptitiously on one side of the room. He tells patients that if they are expecting an emergency call, they should give out the front desk’s number. He has not told them about the jammer.

Gary bought his jammer from a Web site based in London called PhoneJammer.com. Victor McCormack, the site’s operator, says he ships roughly 400 jammers a month into the United States, up from 300 a year ago. Orders for holiday gifts, he said, have exceeded 2,000.

Kumaar Thakkar, who lives in Mumbai, India, and sells jammers online, said he exported 20 a month to the United States, twice as many as a year ago. Clients, he said, include owners of cafes and hair salons, and a New York school bus driver named Dan.

“The kids think they are sneaky by hiding low in the seats and using their phones,” Dan wrote in an e-mail message to Mr. Thakkar thanking him for selling the jammer. “Now the kids can’t figure out why their phones don’t work, but can’t ask because they will get in trouble! It’s fun to watch them try to get a signal.”

Andrew, the San Francisco-area architect, said using his jammer was initially fun, and then became a practical way to get some quiet on the train. Now he uses it more judiciously.

“At this point, just knowing I have the power to cut somebody off is satisfaction enough,” he said.

mapping our world

I'm a big fan of consumer-generated content communities like Yelp.

I'm also harnessing the experience of others to take better photos when I travel. Here's how: I geotag my photos on Flickr and learn more about the places I've visited by seeing what other people have geotagged for the same locations. I'm also planning to scope out new places for good photo ops before going on my next trip.

With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: July 27, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, July 26 — On the Web, anyone can be a mapmaker.

With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos.

In the process, they are reshaping the world of mapmaking and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely to be both richer and messier than any other.

They are also turning the Web into a medium where maps will play a more central role in how information is organized and found.

Already there are maps of biodiesel fueling stations in New England, yarn stores in Illinois and hydrofoils around the world. Many maps depict current events, including the detours around a collapsed Bay Area freeway and the path of two whales that swam up the Sacramento River delta in May.

James Lamb of Federal Way, Wash., created an online map to illustrate the spread of graffiti in his town and asked other residents to contribute to it. “Any time you can take data and represent it visually, you can start to recognize patterns and see where you need to put resources,” said Mr. Lamb, whose map now pinpoints, often with photographs, nearly 100 sites that have been vandalized.

Increasingly, people will be able to point their favorite mapping service to a specific location and discover many layers of information about it: its hotels and watering holes, its crime statistics and school rankings, its weather and environmental conditions, the recent news events and the history that have shaped it. A good portion of this information is being contributed by ordinary Web users.

In aggregate, these maps are similar to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, in that they reflect the collective knowledge of millions of contributors.

“What is happening is the creation of this extremely detailed map of the world that is being created by all the people in the world,” said John V. Hanke, director of Google Maps and Google Earth. “The end result is that there will be a much richer description of the earth.”

This fast-growing GeoWeb, as industry insiders call it, is in part a byproduct of the Internet search wars involving Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. In the race to popularize their map services — and dominate the potentially lucrative market for local advertising on maps — these companies have created the tools that are allowing people with minimal technical skills to do what only professional mapmakers were able to do before.

“It is a revolution,” said Matthew H. Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Now with all sorts of really very accessible, very straightforward tools, anybody can make maps. They can select data, they can add data, they can communicate it with others. It truly has moved the power of map production into a completely new arena.”

Online maps have provided driving directions and helped Web users find businesses for years. But the Web mapping revolution began in earnest two years ago, when leading Internet companies first allowed programmers to merge their maps with data from outside sources to make “mash-ups.” Since then, for example, more than 50,000 programmers have used Google Maps to create mash-ups for things like apartment rentals in San Francisco and the paths of airplanes in flight.

Yet that is nothing compared with the boom that is now under way. In April, Google unveiled a service called My Maps that makes it easy for users to create customized maps. Since then, users of the service have created more than four million maps of everything from where to find good cheap food in New York to summer festivals in Europe.

More than a million maps have been created with a service from Microsoft called Collections, and 40,000 with tools from Platial, a technology start-up. MotionBased, a Web site owned by Garmin, the navigation device maker, lets users upload data they record on the move with a Global Positioning System receiver. It has amassed more than 1.3 million maps of hikes, runs, mountain bike rides and other adventures.

On the Flickr photo-sharing service owned by Yahoo, users have “geotagged” more than 25 million pictures, providing location data that allows them to be viewed on a map or through 3-D visualization software like Google Earth.

The maps sketched by this new generation of cartographers range from the useful to the fanciful and from the simple to the elaborate. Their accuracy, as with much that is on the Web, cannot be taken for granted.

“Some people are potentially going to do really stupid things with these tools,” said Donald Cooke, chief scientist at Tele Atlas North America, a leading supplier of digital street maps. “But you can also go hiking with your G.P.S. unit, and you can create a more accurate depiction of a trail than on a U.S.G.S. map,” Mr. Cooke said, referring to the United States Geological Survey.

April Johnson, a Web developer from Nashville, has used a G.P.S. device to create dozens of maps, including many of endurance horse races — typically 25-to-50-mile treks through rural trails or parks.

“You can’t buy these maps, because no one has made them,” Ms. Johnson said.

Angie Fura used one of Ms. Johnson’s maps to help organize the Trace Tribute, an endurance ride on trails near Nashville, and distributed the map to dozens of other riders. “It gives riders an opportunity to understand what the race is like, and it allows them to condition their horses in accordance,” Ms. Fura said.

Until recently, most Web maps were separate islands that could be viewed only one at a time and were sometimes hard to find. But Google and Microsoft have developed tools that make it possible for multiple layers of data to be viewed on a single map. And Google is working to make it easier to search through all online maps.

Now, a tourist heading to, say, Maui can find the hotels and restaurants on the island and display them on a map that also superimposes photos from Flickr and users’ reviews of various beaches.

The same information is quickly moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional renderings. Microsoft, for example, has created 3-D models of 100 cities worldwide and aims to have 500 models in the next year.

“You will have a digital replica of the world in true 3-D,” said Erik Jorgensen, general manager of Live Search at Microsoft.

For the Internet search companies, these efforts are part of a race to capture the expected advertising bonanza that will come as users browse through these maps in search of businesses and services.

In the process, they are creating technologies whose impact could be similar to those of desktop publishing software, which turned millions of computer users into publishers.

“The possibilities for doing amazing kinds of things, to tell stories or to help tell stories with maps, are just endless,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the journalism school at the University of California in Berkeley.

Some of Mr. Gillmor’s journalism students are working with a researcher at Dartmouth to add photographs, videos and interviews to a map-based project documenting the house-by-house reconstruction of a section of New Orleans. Mr. Gillmor wants local residents to contribute to the project, which uses Platial’s map service.

“The hope is that the community will tell the story of its own recovery with the map as the dashboard,” he said. “We have just seen the beginning of what people are going to do with this stuff.”

the end of the fourth estate?

I can't say that I buy it. But I do agree that we need to consider the implications for privacy and democracy.
YouTube - EPIC 2015

everything old is new again