George’s Wonder Blog

GOOGLE MAPS - Traffic, Photos and Local Information

Ever want to avoid heavy traffic and traffic accidents during your daily commute (or wherever you’re going)? Ever want to see photos related to the locations at or near where you are traveling? Well evidently the folks over at Google maps figured out we do!

GOOGLE MAPS: Traffic Button

Ok, I’m going to call them new because I just noticed them tonight and the first one is the Traffic button. To the left of the customary Map, Satellite and Terrain buttons you will now see a Traffic button (see screen capture below). According to Stuck in traffic? posted on the Official Google blog, you can get traffic info for over 30 major US cities - certainly more now since that post was made over a year ago! Even if you can’t get specific traffic info in your area concerning the flow of traffic you should be able to get at least some information about blocked roads, traffic accidents and road construction. Below left to right are some thumbnails from a Google map of Atlanta, Georgia showing traffic conditions (live traffic, reporting expected travel speed) Road construction and Blocked Road notifications. Don’t just go to and from work - go with as little traffic as possible.

Google Maps Traffic

GOOGLE MAPS: More button (photos and local info)

You can even see pictures people have taken and information from Wikipedia about many places. Especially if you are going somewhere you’ve never been and even if you have been they you are likely to find these pics and information interesting.

Wikipedia is a great source of info even by itself, but when connected to Google maps they are truly a winning combination!

Pictures taken by people like you and me can be uploaded to Panoramio and connected to the place where they were taken. Photos on Google maps were added last year and I’m sure at this point the issue isn’t finding enough photos in some places, but choosing which ones Google wants to show.

Traffic, Wikipedia information and local pictures make Google Maps more useful and interesting than ever before - check it out!

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Has anybody used MPFree.com? Their site boasts free, legal, over 750,00 songs (I guess that’s really 750,000), no costs of any kind or anything. In other words it sounds too good to be true, so what’s the deal? Is MPFree.com a rip off? What’s the catch? Is it a good, safe place to get MP3’s without my name and email address being sent out to everyone in the world?

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Earlier this week I bought the Sansa Clip MP3 Player and being a newbie to the world of MP3 players and downloading MP#’s I thought I was going to be locked into Rhapsody on a monthly basis. From what I’d read it was a monthly subscription and was concerned that if I got my music from Rhapsody (or any other subscription-based MP3 service) I might not be able to listen to **my** MP3’s after quitting.

ENTER AMAZON

Some googling reminded me that Amazon.com sells MP3 downloads, both albums AND single tracks. For as little as 89 or 99 cents I was downloading the songs I wanted instead of buying entire albums, just the best songs I wanted. If you don’t already have an Amazon.com account all you have to do is sign up (its free), download the Amazon MP3 Downloader (you need it for their MP3’s), search for and download the music you want, select the songs in Windows Media Player (10 or higher) you want on your Sansa Clip MP3 and drag-n-drop, click a button and PRESTO!

I was happy to find out I didn’t need to reply on a monthly service and pay them each and every month for my MP3’s.

USING AMAZON TO DOWNLOAD MP3’s

If you are interested in downloading your MP3’s from Amazon.com read Amazon.com Digital Music: Getting Started with MP3 Downloads.

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Last Thursday OpenOffice.org, Google and others in the world of open source got together to present “…a new model of technology training…”. I heard of OpenOffice.org years back when I had a copy of Office 2000 and ignored it. Then Office 2003 was announced and when I first heard about the activation process and projected cost I thought to myself, “Gosh that OpenOffice stuff sounds suddenly really cool.” I used my Office 2000 until it was worn out and then switched to OpenOffice.org and I’ve been using it on ALL of my computers ever since.

Well, anyway if you use OpenOffice.org, love open source or just love Google you might want to read the Google OpenSource blog’s OpenOffice.org Training at Google New York and see how the event went, and what to do if you are interested in organizing an Open Source ‘untraining’ (click and read to see what untraining is).

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Gmail has recently added a new tab to Gmail settings, the Labs tab where us Gmail users can offer feedback on proposed Gmail features.

In Introducing Gmail Labs the Gmail Team says:

The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break.

If you are trying out any experimental Gmail Labs features and are having trouble read Disable Labs . Happy Labbing!

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