EveryBlock is a fantastic new service that is a “news feed for your neighbourhood”, created by Adrian Holovaty of Django and other fame (and others of course).
The mapping side of their site is a strong focus, and they talk about why they went down a somewhat custom route:
For the technology-inclined reader, here’s how we put our map platform together. All web technologies are a “stack,” like layers in a map, and our map stack starts at the top with OpenLayers, which provides the click’n’drag’n’zoom interface. The next step down in the stack is Mapnik, which renders geospatial data into graphical images. At the bottom of the stack is our collection of geospatial data, which includes TIGER/Line and shapefiles from various city governments, as well as databases and tools that operate on that data, such as PostGIS, Shapely, and OGR. Finally, the “secret sauce” layer in the stack is TileCache, which actually sits between OpenLayers and Mapnik. It provides caching of the map tiles that are generated by Mapnik and served to OpenLayers. I say “secret” because it’s transparent to both the layers it sits between, and also because it greatly speeds up the entire stack, making it possible to deploy and scale a large mapping application. It’s worth mentioning that all these layers of the stack are open source or licensed freely. If you can build and deploy a web application, you can build and deploy a complete standalone geospatial and mapping application. The tools and data are there for the taking.
Comments aren’t enabled on that entry, so I thought I would just post here. I am a little surprised at the characterization of Google Maps (and other services):
With Google Maps or any other web-based mapping service, we’d be limited to the color palette, typeface, and other design elements that service’s designers chose. While those maps can be handsome products, their choices aren’t our choices, and don’t mesh well with our site’s aesthetics.
I find this a touch confusing, as you can create custom map types (with layers that you want), and you can extend the UI with custom overlays, custom controls, and you basically end up with something that doesn’t look at all like maps.google.com, other than the Google logo.
You can see this in action with some examples. Below you see Runway Finder, and you can also check out other custom maps such as Map WOW, NY Subway.
For UI changes you can see Rotten Neighbor, Ace Hardware and Lonely Planet.
There are plenty of reasons to have to jump from Google Maps to your own solution, and this may be the right choice for Everyblock (they know a touch more about their application than me!). You can go further and further with the online mapping solutions right now and I would find it hard to not use them.
