Today someone commented on my post about Platial and introduced me to the very similar Foundcity, so I thought I'd make a new post revisiting this particular idea for a Google mashup.
Platial is a little fancier than Foundcity, but they both seem to serve a similar purpose.
In both of these cases, we have a Google mashup that combines a Google map with songs, pictures, tags, text, and really any other media that you might want to "pin" to a location.
Let's say you pass by the prettiest flowers you've ever seen on the side of a road. Take a picture of them and send them to one of these sites with a description. A mark will be placed at that location. Clicking on that mark brings you to the picture and the description. Now you pass someone doing a chalk drawing on the sidewalk that really looks cool, so you start taking a video of the person doing the process. You can then post this video to one of these sites linking the video to that location forever, despite what happens to the chalk. You might also associate a depiction of Satan with your ex-boyfriend's house.
There are more practical applications too. Simply mark all of the Vegan restaurants in your city. Every time you pass a gas station, update the price attached to that location. Collect a bunch of locations and add tags to them (e.g., restaurant, vegetarian, theater, theatre, outside, park, trees) so that later you can search through your collection of places using this new information that isn't going to be available in Google Maps. It allows you to make your own map smarter.
There are a lot of possibilities here. Its' a way for you to "define" the places around you using all sorts of media. This is why these sites have been related to Wikipedia, which allows people to define things that may or may not already have a conventional definition.
So check out some of the maps already made by other people. Try making your own. I am guessing that there is a way to easily make these sites work with your cell phone, thus making it very easy to make notes as you go along in your day.
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