Why Wikipedia Accuracy Won’t Cut It For Google Local – Miriam Ellis, Searchengineguide.com

A great summary of the contradictions that Google Maps faces between its supposedly wiki nature and the reality of local business listings. Google, by not prioritizing record accuracy in Local, has created a less than ideal platform for local in many ways. Read Miriam’s take on why wiki won’t work in the weal world. 

Hesitating Over a Smartphone’s Price? It Could Save You Money – Bob Tedeschi, NY Times

I am always amazed when a writer checks his intelligence at the door when writing about technology. The premise of the article is that you should buy a Smartphone like the G1 or the iPhone so that you can save all that money on your future purchases with real time, on site shopping comparison tools like ShopSavvy. Well when I do the math, I can spend $200 on an iPhone and $20/mo more than I can currently spending on a data plan so I can save 10% on my next purchase. It seems like an expensive way to save money to me. Seems like the self delusional rationalization of consumerism to me.

Mobile Speed Trap Mapping with iPhone – Virtual Earth, An Evangelist’s Blog from Microsoft

Check out the feature list:
•Speech notification of Speed Traps based on current moving direction, speed of the driver, and distance to closest point
•Microsoft Virtual Earth display of Speed Traps 

Now this is product that would allow me to embrace some self delusional rationalization of my own. I get enough speeding tickets in a year to pay for an iPhone several times over. Hmm, I suppose I could slow down.

MeetWays – I found this little gem in a Google Geo Developers Blog Post post on reverse geocoding. It’s a site that mashes up the Google AJAX Local Search API with the Google Maps API and just a bit of math. It calculates the point between two addresses on the map, uses the reverse geocoder to find out the address for that point, and then does a local search near that address to find places to meet that are halfway between. The upshot? You can meet your friends halfway and know what’s nearby. 

Eagerly Awaiting Google’s Voice Search For The iPhone – Greg Sterling, SearchEngineLand

Most of you have already read about this new Google initiative to allow searching of the Google index via voice. For those of you that don’t have an iPhone, but would like some sense of what a single field voice search is like try the recently upgraded Goog-411.