Rojo

Remember when people used to say “MapQuest it” if they didn’t want to explain to someone how to get somewhere? That phrase stuck around for quite a while after Google Maps was introduced even as MapQuest’s marketshare eroded. But lately it seems all I ever hear is “Google it.” Google Maps has seen a lot of improvements since its launch to be sure, but for everyone out there Googling their Independence Day destination, here are eight ways Google could make the experience better.

Travel suggestions

Rather not spend all your time with family? Sure you can search for bookstores in Omaha or fishing holes in Florida, but Google Maps should take your previous search history, figure out what interests you and automatically suggest points of interest. Unless you really want to catch up with Aunt Mildred.

Offline mode

Picture this: You’re on a family road trip, tunes blaring, wind blowing with the windows rolled down, and your printed directions fly away never to be seen again. What now? Your navigator pulls out her laptop only to find there is no 3G in Yosemite, but thanks to Google Gears-enabled Maps, she knows right where to direct you.

Make it more social

Location is one underutilized aspect of social networking. Services like Brightkite and Loopt are ready to eat Google’s lunch by taking advantage of location, but Google has a wealth of data it could plot: geocoded photos and videos, datelined news items that get shared in Google Reader, and soon, the real-time location of every 3G iPhone-toting soul in the world. A lot of this data can already be seen on Google Maps through mash-ups, but all of this location data should be rolled into one great location-aware social network.

More options for MyMaps

When Google launched the MyMaps feature in Google Maps last year, it was seen as the death knell for a lot of sites that had been making nifty mash-ups with Google’s API. Now anyone can make a map without knowing a lick of Javascript, PHP or even HTML. If all you want to make is a simple map of where to see fireworks, MyMaps probably has you covered. But what if it’s a map of independent coffee shops serving up free Wi-Fi that you want? You’ll probably want to include a common set of information about each coffee shop including whether they serve Danish, what kind of music they play and how good the chai lattes are on a scale from one to five. You could include all of that information as text in the description for each coffee shop, but that wouldn’t make for a very easily searchable database. Rather, Google needs to include some basic support for building better lists if it truly wants to make all the world’s information findable.

Map quantitative data

Another way to make MyMaps betters would be to include a way to map quantitative data such as household income, broadband penetration or any of the other demographic data organizations collect. Again, this can be done with Google’s API, but the masses are missing out.

Layers, layer, layers

Google’s recent addition of a terrain map is nice if you’re looking for a peak to climb, but there’s no reason to stop there. Users should be able to turn map features on and off. Don’t want to see county roads? Gone. And there is no end to the layers Google could add. Google Maps should get political and add county, congressional district and city divisions for the civicly minded. And how about more live data? Like the real-time location of flights and Amtrak trains.

GPS data

Ever taken a road trip and wanted to share a map of where you’ve been? Google Maps won’t let you do it. The service should accept GPX data from GPS devices for this very reason. And think, you could share that map on the yet-to-be-named Google Maps-based social network.

English please

I hate to be one of those people, but is it too much to ask for English labels on foreign places ?

[Roadtrip image compliments of eHow]

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In case you haven’t noticed, there is a lot of discussion going on over at FriendFeed. This has created a mini-crisis for those of us that blog professionally – a lot of the best conversation is taking place off-site.

But developers are quickly coming to the rescue, and the latest is Mark Carey, who has developed a plugin for Movable Type bloggers that allows you to import comments from FriendFeed to your blog. Even better, it scans FriendFeed for all instances of your blog post and grabs the comments. For example, when this post is published, not only will it hit our RSS feed, but it will hit my FriendFeed account, Pete’s FriendFeed, Mashable’s Twitter account, and hopefully be shared by a few people on Google Reader. With the new plugin (if we were using Movable Type, but I digress), comments made on any of those items in FriendFeed would show up right here on this post.

On the other side of the equation, if you leave a comment on a blog that has the plugin installed, you can select to have that comment appear on FriendFeed as well, allowing you to participate in two communities for the price of one.

For bloggers using other platforms, a few other solutions have already been developed for dealing with “the friendfeed issue.” Disqus and Plaxo hooked up recently to enable comments to flow back and forth between the two services, while Glenn Slaven has developed a plugin that WordPress bloggers can install to bridge comments with FriendFeed.

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Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Where The Locals Eat

20-word Description: Where The Locals Eat is an interactive restaurant guide which spotlights the top 100 local restaurants in the largest 50 cities in America.

CEO’s Pitch: To get the inside scoop on where to eat when you travel or to find new restaurants in your city, check out Where The Locals Eat. Pointing you to the nation’s very best restaurants, from haute cuisine to cheap eats. Where The Locals Eat, free-of-charge and fully searchable by city, category and restaurant name, contains detailed information on thousands of restaurants and provides online reservations, constantly updated foodie news and mapping of restaurants by neighborhood. Look for the new Where The Locals Eat iPhone application as well (July 11th) which will deliver this information directly to users’ iPhones using GPS and allowing them to rate, make lists, and more. Because when you travel, don’t you want to eat like a local?

Mashable’s Take: The number of restaurants in the United States is immense. Even if you were to take a peek at the list of locations within, say, 50 big and medium-sized cities, you’d likely be overwhelmed. Without a guide, that is.

Where The Locals Eat is a name more polysyllabic than some might prefer, but it does the trick. If nothing else, it’s entirely straightforward. The premise of the service is simple. You’re given a list of 50 cities, in which lots of people live and travel to. For each city, you’re shown a list of about 100 restaurants deemed the best in their respective categories. This goes for everything from pizza and/or burger joints, steakhouses, delicatessens, sushi bars, and vegetarian haunts. It’s like Zagat, but with a broader national spread and less focus on each individual metropolis. Which would likely appeal to people not wanting to think too much about the selection process. Some just want food fast, with as few complications or details as possible. Where The Locals Eat serves that market ably.

As for the site’s structure, it’s well made. Tidy and intuitive, it’s built to serve users on the desktop and on the go. Want to map out a single location, or perhaps an entire list? You can. Driving directions can also be had. Users can even have location info sent to their mobile devices. An iPhone application will soon be added to service’s feature set. A launch is scheduled for July 11 to coincide with Apple’s own planned product and service releases. All said, the package looks complete.

If you’d like to read up on restaurant news in a particular city, there is an adjunct blog called iEat that covers the array of cities listed in the guide.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

There’s a new “next-generation” blog aggregator emerging onto the scene today. It’s called Regator. It’s come out of Atlanta, Georgia. And its builders, a trio of entrepreneurs that include Scott Lockhart (co-founder), Chris Turner (co-founder), and Kimberly Turner (editorial director), have managed to deliver a quite impressive piece of kit.

You might like the green theme topped with “Reg,” the site’s mildly tech-savvy mascot. You might not. But those of you fortunate to get hold of a private beta account, you’re almost certain to enjoy its toolset, presentation, and overall completeness as a ready-to-go feed-reading service.

If you give it a few minutes, you’ll see that everything within Regator’s framework appears well thought out. There’s the main central column where data from blogs is presented in introductory portions. You’re given several lines to read, and if you want to follow through to the original source, you may. And the reading experience is really superb given the speed at which information is refreshed.

But culling text from various sources, placing them into categories, and allowing users to determine the popularity of blog posts isn’t all Regator does. It is able to play back audio and video as well, which is a great convenience as many media hungry consumers well know. If you do a quick browse of the service’s ‘Entertainment’ section, you’ll see just how well media buttons within Regator function.

Click an audio track and a slim bar of options emerges the bottom of the browser window, showing its progress. You can skim a track, raise or lower volume, access a playlist of previously chosen tracks, view the source where the music resides, and even make a purchase if so inclined. An Amazon link is shown, taking you to the retailer’s CD store, not the Amazon MP3 downloads center, which might be the more natural route to take. But that’s a minor point to make. Overall, Regator’s utility works as it should. Video playback operates similarly easily, too, albeit in a pop-up window rather than the media player at the foot of the page.

This may not be a perfect juxtaposition to make here, but I would equate Regator with Digg. Both feature lots of different information, after all. Both sport a wide variety of data, though clearly in different ways. However, I would say Regator has Digg best in the way that it pulls information from blogs, regardless of user submissions. Yes, those posts can be ranked and popularized and de-popularized, as with Digg. (Digg, admittedly, is considerably stronger in that regard, too.) But Regator has a catalog of feeds put in place, so a user can really develop a sort of routine. You can get a number of uses out of the service, in other words. It can be a little social, it can be personal (with your own MyRegator page), it can be taken simply as a standard pool of a variety of information. Whatever you like.

A lot of what makes Regator so good is, as I mentioned earlier, its immediate utility. Sign up, and you’re browsing the blogosphere. That easy. No need to build up a list of blogs from scratch. Just toy around. See what you like. Familiarize yourself with it. There are over 3,000 “hand-selected blogs” listed; The convenience factor here is everything.

Alright, enough praising. If you’d like to give Regator a try, the site’s creators are offering an invitation to 100 Mashable readers to test the private beta. Just visit the Regator homepage, and where an invite code is required on the registration form, type ‘mashable’.

From Alec Baldwin to Anna Kournikova, RuPaul to Donald Trump, we’ve put together a list of 50+ blog-toting celebrities we think you might want to check out.

Some are clearly promotional blogs, but many seem quite genuine. What celebrity blog would you like to see published?

Actors

Alec Baldwin - Part of The Huffington Post site, the 30 Rock star posts his thoughts on the current political landscape.

Valerie Bertinelli - Currently blogging through the Jenny Craig website about her weight loss.

Zach Braff - The star of Scrubs doesn’t update frequently, but he does post occasional news.

Jackie Chan - The long-time action star updates frequently with photos and thoughts from his travels.

Jenna Fischer - An actress best known for her role as Pam Beesley on The Office blogs on her MySpace page about her life and gives acting tips.

Mariska Hargitay - The Law & Order: Special Victims Unit actress posts occasionally and sometimes has guest bloggers write as well.

Allison Mack - Best known for the role of Chloe on Smallville, Mack uses her blog to keep her fans up-to-date and share her passions in life with them.

Alyssa Milano - Milano, former star of Charmed, has a blog about baseball (linked by her name), and another one on her personal site, Alyssa.com.

David Nykl - The actor who plays Zelenka on Stargate: Atlantis posts frequently about life on the set with lots of behind-the-scenes photos.

William Shatner - The star of Star Trek and Boston Legal posts every few months.

Jodie Sweetin - The former star of Full House blogs for OK! Magazine about her life and losing weight after having her baby.

Athletes

Gilbert Arenas - Posts frequently to his blog on the NBA website.

David Beckham - The LA Galaxy player updates his blog roughly once a week about games he’s played and what he’s up to.

Curtis Granderson - The center fielder for the Detroit Tigers blogs over on ESPN about baseball, life and even the occasional movie review.

Anna Kournikova - The tennis player better known for her looks than her skill, has a blog that mostly promotes her personal appearances and upcoming events.

Pat Neshek - Pitcher for the Minnesota Twins that talks about baseball in general, what it’s like to be recruited, and his love of trading sports trading cards.

Curt Schilling - The pitcher for the Boston Red Sox posts several times a week on average.

Comedians

Roseanne Barr - The comic, actress and writer is a frequent blogger with multiple updates per day sometimes.

Dave Barry - A long time humor columnist, Dave Barry is also an active blogger.

Michael Ian Black - Co-creator of the comedy trio Stella and Wet Hot American Summer actor, Michael Ian Black updates his blog regularly. This one is definitely worth checking out.

Margaret Cho - Cho is best known for her comedy tours, but she is also a copious blogger.

Tom Green - Comic Tom Green, who spoke with us back in June, not only broadcasts video from his house, but he also blogs it.

Rosie O’Donnell - Rosie O’Donnell has been a well-known, and sometimes controversial, blogger for quite a while now.

Miscellaneous

David Byrne - The Talking Heads founding member is also an artist and writer, amongst other things. He updates his blog a few times a month about projects he’s working on, his life, and ideas on current events.

Mark Cuban - Billionaire, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Dancing With the Stars contestant, Mark Cuban is not shy about sharing his opinions on his blog.

Adam Curry - The former MTV VJ and huge podcasting advocate blogs daily on his site.

Paris Hilton - The actress/singer/model blogs on her MySpace account from time to time, mostly to clear up rumors about herself.

James Lipton - The writer, executive producer and host of Bravo TV’s “Inside The Actor’s Studio” posts about his work on the show and the entertainment industry.

Joseph Mallozzi - Works on Stargate:Atlantis, but finds time to post extremely long posts from the set almost daily.

Ronald D. Moore - One of the men behind the current Battlestar Galactica, he blogs about all sorts of things.

Jamie Oliver - The television chef blogs frequently as well as occasionally moblogging.

RuPaul - The well-known drag queen/singer/actor and more has been blogging regularly since 2001.

Martha Stewart - The Domestic Diva talks about her personal life, what’s going on behind-the-scenes, and more.

Donald Trump - Focused on his Trump University brand, this blog features a mixture of posts from Trump as well as his staff.

Musicians

Lily Allen - One of the favorite subjects of many gossip blogs, Ms. Allen uses her MySpace blog to dispel rumors about herself, talk about her new music and whatever is going on in her life.

Barenaked Ladies - The entire band posts to their blog.

Thomas Dolby - While it would be easy to make a “he blinded us with blogging!” joke, we’ll try to avoid it as we tell you the well known musician is a frequent blogger.

MC Hammer - It seems MC Hammer is everywhere all over the web, and on his blog he’s tackling just about every subject you can think of.

John Mayer - John Mayer talks about everything from recording his latest music to what his current favorite gadgets are.

Moby - Well known musician Moby has been running his blog since 2000.

Gene Simmons - Known as much for his reality show as his band, KISS, Gene Simmons blog is frequently updated.

Nikki Sixx - The Motley Crue and Sixx:A.M. bassist updates his fans via his blog every so often.

Kanye West - the popular hip hop artist and producer updates his blog regularly, mostly with pictures and videos that have to do with music, fashion and design.

News

Daryn Kagan - A former correspondent for CNN who now does daily blogging about positive news stories.

Meredith Viera - Host of Today and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is blogging through iVillage.

Brian Williams - Posts on a fairly regular basis to the NBC blog, The Daily Nightly.

Writers

Peter David - Comic book writer and novelist, Peter David has been blogging since 2002 on a very regular basis.

Neil Gaiman - Mr. Gaiman is a comic book writer/novelist/television creator who has been blogging for quite some time.

William Gibson - The well-known author of Neuromancer has been blogging on his site since 2003.

Danny Rubin - The writer of the film Groundhog Day still hears about it so much that he started a blog to answer questions and discuss the philosophy of the movie.

Kevin Smith - Writer and director of such movies as Clerks and Chasing Amy only started seriously blogging in 2005, but has been prolific ever since.

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Flickr/ MP3 mashup service Myplaylist has launched Myplaylist Lyrics, a service that combines lyrics into a mini playlist built for each song.

As a user searches for a song, Myplaylist searches the Internet for the images and the MP3 that is best associated with this song (finding the best quality version), then compiles all this with lyrics, offering a comprehensive mashup of content for that song.

Key features include search for a quote from the lyrics to find the song; continuous play, as one song finishes the system will find and play another similar; boolean search so use of “” for more specific results and did you mean? (spelling errors - suggests correct name)

Myplaylist is one of the smaller competitors in the streaming mp3 playing space, but its unique mashup of Flickr imagery and song has won a loyal fan base. The lyrics service, relying on the broader internet instead of a central database, offers a surprisingly solid lyric delivery service, and what better accompaniment for lyrics than great imagery and the song searched for playing in the background.

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When you first read about the Google-Viacom lawsuit, you never thought that it would affect you directly, did you? Think again.

Judge Louis L. Stanton, presiding over the federal court for the Southern District of New York, has ordered Google to give Viacom the IP addresses and other data about the users who watched YouTube videos, either on YouTube itself or embedded on a third party website. If you want to get depressed further, read the entire document here.

Let me tell you, in the shortest possible terms, what this means. It means you. Unless you’ve been extra careful to only watch non-copyrighted videos on YouTube (yeah, right), Viacom could sue you. No, it’s even worse: they could actually win.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an analysis which shows that this decision is in violation of the VPPA (Video Privacy Protection Act). However, and interestingly enough, the court denied Viacom’s request of YouTube’s source code, which means that the big company - Google - got protected, but the little guy - us - got screwed.

The court justified its decisions partly by what the folks at Google had written in a blog post a while ago. An IP address is not personal data; it cannot identify you without any additional information, they argued. Google has stabbed itself in the foot with that post, but even without going into its analysis, I can tell you the following:

a) Viacom wants these IP addresses precisely because they want to be able to identify the users. Why else would they ask for them?
b) Yes, the IP address is only one piece of the puzzle. YouTube login info - which Google also must produce to Viacom - is another. I bet those two are enough for full identification of many users. But even if they’re not, asking for this data and saying “they’re not enough to identify the user” is completely stupid, because little by little Viacom will get the rest of the data they need - from the ISPs, for example. It’s like saying: hey, you: I’m not going to ask you for your personal data, only your first name and the city you live in, please.

I think I’m not alone here when I say screw you, Viacom. Take your lousy videos and watch them yourselves. Slap a nice watermark on each one so I can make sure I never watch one again. In the meantime, can someone make sure that judges who probably don’t have a clue about what an IP address is don’t get assigned to cases like this? Thank you.

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