WebProNews

It’s Friday, and odds are that you wish it was Saturday.  Or that you weren’t at work - it usually amounts to the same thing.  And although the powers of time travel and transportation are beyond me, there are some Google-approved maps that focus on faraway places.

The Google LatLong blog actually collected four of them over the past week; two center on New York, and two were highlighted for their European relevance.  The first of the NY maps is titled “Queen’s Jazz Trail,” and documents “Homes of Jazz Greats and other notables in Queens, NY.”  Credit goes to David Bellel for creating it, and to Google’s Liz Xu for publicizing his effort.

Xu, a software engineer, also makes note of Bellel’s “Famous & Infamous Manhattan: East Village.”  The map covers a lot of crime-related spots, but if you ever want to turn this into a walking tour, fear not: most of the incidents took place a long time ago.  And many of the points of interest aren’t “bad,” anyway; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with James Fenimore Cooper’s old residence, for example.

On to the other maps, then.  These were highlighted in a post by Thai Tran, a product manager, who writes, “I just returned from a vacation in Europe, and I found two Mapplets invaluable for planning my trip. . . .  Wikimapia.org is a website where people have . . . annotated millions of places all over the world, and you can now view these annotations on Google Maps using their Mapplet.”

Tran then continues, “Booking.com is an online hotel reservation service that has especially good coverage in Europe.  Using the Booking.com Mapplet, I was able to find out which hotels were available and compare their rates and proximity to the locations I was most interested in seeing.”

These sites and maps could be useful to you, if you’re planning on taking on a trip.  They should, at the least, be able to burn a few more minutes until the end of your workweek.