Mapbuilder "lets you tag locations on a map and publish it on your own site. Mapping is now easier than ever. It's free"
The full tagline deserves to be quoted on this occasion because Mapbuilder really is a brilliant service. It only took me 20 minutes to produce this map of Limerick with three hotels tagged. I'll be adding pubs, restaurants and more over the coming days.
I think it would be really nice to have a detailed anotated map of every city in Ireland, if for nothing more than blogger meetups. Want to help?
January 27, 2006
I love it -- Google Maps is turning into the de-facto standard mapping system world-wide. It's also a classic example of how the Ordnance Survey, by keeping a close, proprietary hold on their data, is managing to make itself an irrelevance.
If they adopted the approach that US government departments do -- open their data for free, public use -- the value of the derived work for the economy would likely be a lot greater than the value that is currently obtained through their licensing fees.
It's amazing that Google, a private company, is acting as the agent of change by giving their data away for free here...
Posted by: Justin Mason | January 27, 2006 at 07:27 PM
Absolutely agreed Justin. That's why we started the OpenEir GPS mapping group a year ago -
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/openeir
Its been rather quite for a while but we've got 100 members now and I've a feeling 2006 is the year it really takes off :)
Posted by: James Corbett | January 27, 2006 at 09:33 PM
Great tool! ... but google still does'nt have 'Mullingar' on the map!
Posted by: CGorman | January 28, 2006 at 04:31 PM
Where? ;-) :p
Posted by: James Corbett | January 28, 2006 at 04:35 PM
...you know, the big town beside Athlone village?! Home of Michael O'Leary, Genisis Pewter, and Ireland's second fastest growing town (after Letterkenny last time I heard)... seriously, Mullingar is a town of over 20,000 people now, why has'nt Google noticed it!
Posted by: CGorman | January 28, 2006 at 09:50 PM