Results tagged “googlemaps”

Google Street View has been available in several cities but has now made its debut in Boston, according to the Globe. The process allows you to take a 360 view of an address. If you want to use it, just go to Google Maps, type in a Boston address, and click on the little yellow man that pops up at the address. A new window will appear with a street-level image of the area. You...

Earlier today the home page of Channel 5's website carried a story about a Massachusetts bridge closure in prominent position. It's since been buried on the site. The story with the headline "Mass. Bridge Closed After Minn. Tragedy" evoked imagery of any of those bridges we reported on earlier, I-91 closures as it crisscrosses the Connecticut river, or some span over hills on Rt. 2, or even more local like the length that leads over...

Jason Bailey may have been chasing the car that eventually crashed into a tree on Blue Hill Avenue and Callender Street yesterday morning. That crash killed a passenger, 18-year-old Porsche Hubbard, and injured the female driver, a 10-year-old girl, and a baby. The DA's office announced that 28-year-old Bailey, of Mattapan, was arrested and charged for the crime yesterday, and he is being held on $100,000 bail. That announcement says that Bailey was allegedly vicious...

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti...

Zooming in on the South End/Roxbury in Google Maps something interesting showed up: the gentrification line. The high resolution images are in their satellite database for all of Downtown and Back Bay. Most of the South End is included, but once you cross over Mass Ave, into what we generally accept as Roxbury, things aren't quite as clear, they aren't as green either. Back in January the Globe ran a piece called "Breaching Mass...

This afternoon, before the sloppy snow began to fall, a 22 year old man was struck by a Taxi on Huntington Ave near Forsyth St. The taxi clipped the rear wheel of the cyclist and sent him under the rear wheels of a nearby dump truck carrying a full load of scrap concrete. Northeastern News reports that police recovered a fixed-gear bike (with mangled front wheel), a cell phone, a right shoe, a messenger bag,...

Bostonist would suggest that if you're looking to get from Boston to London you check out the number of international flights available on any given day. Apparently Google Maps makes a different suggestion – 3,642 miles of swimming across the Atlantic Ocean, a stopover in France, and a crossing of the English Channel. It is not surprising that the Green Line won't get you there. Via Digg...

Uncle Google unwrapped another Werther's and handed it to us. Again, with butterscotch goodness in our mouths, we're totally giddy. Today's sugar high comes in the form of real-time traffic information on the Traffic button toggle on Google Maps. Major roads from Worcester to Boston and northbound and southbound from the area are color coded. It's also available in Providence, Springfield, Hartford, and many cities nation wide. The official Google blog gives us insight...

It's tough to not envy our Austin peers these days, as the sonic ear candy that is South by Southwest looms in mid-March. Without the ability to hop on a plane and hightail it to Texas, many have been left to look at initial lineup announcements and imagine wandering Sixth Street with happy grins on their faces. A new tool on the official festival site could add to the bitterness, but it can also...

The Red Sox have us all dreaming. Dreaming of warmer weather. Dreaming of baseball. Dreaming of the Fall Classic. We're just a week and a half away from the first matchup of the spring training opening match up – so there is a lot of time to consume with daydreaming about baseball. Because we don't have enough vacation time to spend the entire spring training season in Ft. Meyers we'll have to rely on...

There is something to be said for aerial photography. It's a great way to see the city on the large. It's expensive to take and it's not very interactive unless you know a pilot and can hop a ride to go check out the sites yourself. There is a company based in LA that is using technology to provide not only an aerial, zoomable view, but also panoramas and time lapse photography using gigapixel digital technology. We found this version (shown left) of a zoomable Copley Square as proof of the wonderment that is technology. And we thought that 10.2 megapixels was the new hotness. xRes: Extreme Resolution Large Scale Image Creation currently features an incredibly high resolution image of Copley Square and Back Bay as taken from above this summer (you can see the cow parade below). Looking in from what we can see of the same scene from Google Maps there's little more than a shadow of the John Hancock tower covering the same area. The Prudential sky walk was the site of the photography that was pulled together to make this panorama. We're hoping that Big Brother doesn't get a hold of this technology, it's a little scary what can be photographed from the top of the Pru, especially if you're paranoid.

While you were waiting in line for the CharlieGate to open the MBTA has been hard at work. Fixing escalators? No. Running busses on schedule? Of course not. Giving their website a complete overhaul? You got it. This morning browsing over to the MBTA.com website brings up a whole new page. Compared to the last 2002-esque design of the T website of yesterday the new implementation is in the flashy web 2.0 vein.

The days are definitely shorter. Daylight escapes us all while toiling away at work. We leave under the blanket of dusk to head home. Less daylight hours almost always seem to have a negative effect on the motivation to go out on the town. Luckily the powers of the internets make it easier to figure out the closest dimly lit place to go grab a brew in your neighborhood. Last year the beermapping project...

It's a funny thing when you tell people they can take the bus from point A to point B in Boston. Most people just laugh. The buses in Boston don't really run on their schedule, though some get close. The problem is that most folks know how to get around using the trains and trolleys. busses simply confound most users in their routes. As they occasionally pass by they display things like "via Broadway" or "via Kenmore" with some indication of destination or origin of the line. But with the layout of the city streets it is sometimes difficult to figure out which Tremont or School Street in the city they will be traveling down, and if you'll actually be able to get to your destination. Thanks to intrepid reader Stuart who sent us to Google Maps Mania to find a new tool on the tubes that gives us a map overlay of the bus routes in Boston. It was cool when we found that we could draw the MBTA train lines onto Google Maps, but now we can find out where the busses run. The site is an experiment in Google Map API and javascript, and it returns an error for us when we browse over in Firefox. Apparently the script is slow – which we find humorously (or ironically) fitting for the MBTA busses. There's room for improvement and Laura (the author) welcomes suggestions. Only routes 1 through 105 are represented thus far. Another Google Map experiment that's got some utility for the masses. We'll take it.

In an anti-terrorism exercise to test bomb sniffing dogs and their handlers at Logan, State Police attached an 8 ounce piece of plastic explosive to a Massport pickup. The explosive turned up missing. No word on where the dogs are.

Exploit Boston just showed us a new tool. We're totally keen on it. Though our preference has been for Google Maps since they launched, we knew Yahoo would do something to integrate their purchased web properties to try and win us over to their map world. This. Could. Be. It. You've been able to geotag your photos for some time. Now all you have to do is drag and drop photos on a map. Using location data with your Flickr set and maps will probably result in a greater time vacuum while toying with your photos. Sooz pushed the Exploit Boston photo group's geotagged (or geocoded, same thing) photos of events anywhere you take them, to the Yahoo Map with the ease Flickr and Yahoo integration have provided. The result isn't massive yet – but it is interactive and relies on users to add their geotags to their photos when submitting them to the group. The map will surely become more populated as the data set continues to increase. More news on the where, what, and how at Flickr Blog.

Tomorrow the big trucks roll through our neighborhood picking up the stuff on the curb. Bostonist takes pride in the fact that during the last five weeks, our household has put out more in our blue recycling bin than trash. No, we haven’t just been hoarding the un-recyclables - it is just the result of learning to engage in three-R vigilance. If you don’t have a bin for recycling get in touch with your city, they’ll drop one off for free. Apartment buildings with six or more units are considered “large” in Boston, and if you dwell in such a place, contact your landlord about recycling (and refer him/her to this page).

No longer is Bostonist's passion for cartography, especially on the interweb, a closely held secret. We could go ahead and link to all those times we've talked about Google Maps in past posts, but that would be a long list and we'd rather point you towards our new search tool, Rollyo, at the bottom of the page. Mapquest used to be the standard for online mapping, yahoo encroached, but Microsoft was slow to the...

. . . she looks at maps and sees people waving! And now, Google Maps brings that same effect to all of us. Bostonist, along with everyone else in the world who likes cool stuff, has told you lots of times about how Google Maps it the hottest thing since Susan Orlean's upstate New York weekend palace. Now we learn that it is even hotter than ever, because a couple new levels of zoom have been added to the satellite view (at least in cities, which is where it matters). Why is this so great? Well, to start with, we're pretty sure we can see our car, since it's pretty much always parked in the same place. We can also see with more vivd detail than ever before a B-line train, people playing basketball, and our old friend, the above-ground central artery. Lamentably, the satellite photos were taken on a day when the Sox were not at home (or maybe playing a night game), but there do appear to be people in the stands and cars in lot at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket. If only we didn't have an actual day job and this blogging to do, Bostonist would spend all day combing the satellite pics for unusual stuff. That said, we'll buy a beer for the first person (of legal drinking age, of course) who can find us a Google Maps picture of a car crash anywhere in the Commonwealth.

Bleeding-heart, privacy-loving, pinko-communist civil libertarian that we are, Bostonist has sometimes harbored doubts about sex offender registries. But we have also long been a map nerd (our bedroom in high school was decorated from floor to ceiling in bus and subway maps from around the world), and Google Maps is, in our humble opinion, the best thing on the internet since HotOrNot.com. So we can't help but be morbidly intrigued by MapSexOffenders.com, a service that (surprise) maps sex offenders using Google Maps (and will notify you by e-mail when a sex-offender moves into the neighborhood). The Commonwealth already provided comprehensive listings (with pictures) of level three sex offenders (and level two in some communities) by city or town, but that's not nearly as convenient as seeing a handy visual representation of the fact that a man twice convicted of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 lives in a house we pass every time we walk to Target.

Bostonist usually tells you about the mash-ups that are kicking new tunes over at the Independent. Today, however, we were told about the newest Google Maps mash-up. Seth Fitzsimmons (co-founder of the dailyjolt.com) over at mojoDNA.net sliced and diced the panels he pulled from Google Maps with the maps he grabbed from the MBTA site. The result: MBTA bus lines and subway stops sitting on top of a nice clean map. The demo on his site is apparently in nice working order, though the site itself seems to be on the fritz. The ability to locate the best bus route is key, but it’s too bad Seth can’t do anything about making the buses run on time. If you’re both crafty and tech savvy Bostonist has heard about a site that might interest you. myGmaps is the two turn tables for your microphone. Thanks Rajiv Aaron Manglani for the tip