When I was in college, one sight I never failed to enjoy was that of a frenzied (typically younger) student sprinting across campus on their way to a class they were undoubtedly late for. I loved seeing this, but not …

Thanks to the hard work of any number of individuals (along with Google’s willingness to trust them), certain areas of Google Maps will now be a lot more detailed.  An impressive 17 countries and territories have been deemed set to graduate from Google Map Maker to Google Maps.

Although you may not hear about it often, Google Map Maker serves an important function by allowing people to manually add details about roads, towns, and other things when traditional mapping data is unavailable.  It was introduced towards the end of 2008.

Getting lost in Oceania got a lot harder in the last week or so, and should continue to grow trickier over time.  Not only was some already-extensive Street View coverage in Australia expanded, but the self-propagating Google Map Maker was launched in 43 new countries and territories.