Community mapping is moving more and more into the digital realm. Though the intent is the same as more traditional forms of paper based mapping they do have the capacity to reach a wider, international audience and incorporate various other media that have the potential to add weight to a community’s spatial representation. Check out the rrove website and some of the links in the blog roll at the side of this blog.
A community mapping website, in our definition, is a service that gets its members to map and define places. Through crowd-sourcing, these sites are building a database/directory of local and nearby locations that their users can discover and visit. Why is this important? We all know that search advertising is the fastest growing industry in the Internet. Within that market, local search is the up-and-comer. In the next few years, it will be the largest segment within search!
It’s refreshing to see how others have approached community mapping. Some have focused on map creation while others do it through mobile apps. More than that, some players have mapped the community of users to map the physical community (i.e. neighborhoods). Here’s how nine websites (all free) are doing it, what makes them awesome and how you can use their services in your Internet life.
http://www.rrove.com/blog/2006/12/04/9-awesome-community-mapping-websites/
