For those who don’t know Google has finally merged their Keyhole satellite company with their map service and you can get a really nice view of north America from above. A very quick community sprung up around this feature and have been having a lot of fun with it. People are using google maps and Flickr to create memory maps of their home town or locations that have a lot of history with them.
Another fun site related to Google Maps is Google Sightseeing which has been collecting some of the more interesting photos of the world in to one blog.
In the future I see a My Google with the ability to add tags to the whole world. I could tag places I’ve been and maybe even plan out entire trips marking down where I want to stop with a note system similar to Flickrs’. Along with a system to date the notes you might be able to follow me as I travel around and take notes on the world by scrubbing through a time line, or a rang of times. Of course this would all be shareable with the ability to tag and organize notes and groups of notes.
Though I would not be any good at it I look forward to who ever takes their My Google map notes and uses the rss it publishes as their travel blog. I think that would be an interesting read.