When Maps Meet Encylopedias

Google Maps is a great resource for finding your way around the city, especially in an area you've never been to. The only problem is everything looks so unrecognizable from the satellite and it gets time consuming to pin point every needed locale. Google Maps Street View is nice, but only available in some parts of a few cities.

Enter Wikimapia which combines all the great aspects of Wikipedia with all those of Google Maps. Everything on Wikimapia looks like what you would see on any satellite except the screen is covered with a cornucopia of boxes. Hover over a box, and it'll tell you what you're looking at. Click on it and a little window will pop up, giving you a short description. There are ads, done, of course, by Google.

Only a year and a half old, users have tagged over five million sites. Few things are perhaps as good as capturing Hayek's "man on the street" as this.