On my browser toolbar I have bookmarks for about 10 really important sites that I visit multiple times throughout the day: Yahoo mail, Twitter, Techmeme, Y Combinator/Hacker News, the Industry Standard, etc.
But there's only one map-related site, and it's not Google Maps. It's the National Weather Service radar map for Boston, which includes all of southern New England (see screenshot, above). It lets me know in near real-time where the clouds and thunder cells are, and plan outings accordingly.
On my iPod Touch, I also use the free Weather.com app. It has a Google maps mashup which shows a cloud overlay over the user-chosen locations, but the graphics aren't as good and there is a lag on some of the data -- and I suspect some innaccuracies about the location of storms, based on visually comparing the NWS map and the mobile mashup from Weather.com.
Nevertheless, the data available to ordinary users via Web and mobile apps is amazing. TV weathermen used to be the gatekeepers for such data, but no longer. That doesn't mean TV weathermen will be disappearing -- they are still valuable for giving context and forecasting -- but for here-and-now reports they have been made obsolete by technology.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments will be reviewed before being published. Spam, off-topic or hateful comments will be removed.