Mapbuzz has better on-screen editing than MyMaps, and the mash-up is already done for you to use all sorts of great social networking features.
Here is my ride from yesterday –> http://www.mapbuzz.com/viewer/319
(Chris, notice that RESTful URL? 
)
I have been screwing around with locators lately a.k.a geocoders. If you are not familiar, a geocoder is a tool that takes an address or placename and returns a geographic coordinate - a location. What a useful and interesting tool. Geocoding used to be a very difficult and expensive proposition not so long ago. Now, you can choose from numerous free services to use that are uncannily accurate. The bottom line: it’s easy to find stuff you need to find.
In 1999, I was a mapping specialist at an enormous commercial real estate brokerage. We cranked out tons of cartographic products every day. We had a large budget for GIS data and aerial images each year. One of our chief products was basically a map of a list of properties. We made billions of these suckers. We didn’t have a geocoder until about a week before I left the company, and that thing was no great help as it was. We used the Pierson Graphics Map Books and basically memorized a vast portion of the street map for the 7 county metro Denver area and hand geocoded many of the addresses, creating our own buildings database as we went. Back then I swear you could say a business address and could just point to it on the map. An believe me I’m no savant trickster like the zip code guy in Boulder. (go here, scroll down to Z) You do it over and over, you’ll remember them too. We all did. Scary.
Now, take your pick. Google’s mapping API (here, docs ), Yahoo! Maps API (here), MapQuest OpenAPI (here), and others all provide quite robust mapping services including geocoding and are quite easy to use. There’s a free perl module that uses USGS TIGER data out there (well, here). There all pretty darn accurate too. I’ve been using both Google and Yahoo!’s geocoders lately and I’ve been impressed so far at their ability to find random things, such as:
“Hollywood Sign” –> Google Maps found it, Yahoo didn’t.
“Central Park New York” –> Both found
“winsconsin” Note misspelled –> Google maps found Winsconsin College of cosmetology 2960 Allied St, Green Bay, WI, but to be fair, would prompt you in real life that it was misspelled.
Yahoo finds Wisconsin, which I thought was cool.
But anyway, it’s amazing to me that this is a free service. It’s expensive to do geocoding well for most people. You need top quality mapping data. It has to be complete, new and accurate. That costs tons of money. Now that all these data indexing giants have been competing in the GIS/RS data and tools arena, they’re putting the power of these huge data libraries to good use.
If only I’d had that in 1999-2000. We’re lucky these days.