Where 2.0: Google Maps Update

Some interesting developments to watch, two around Hurricane Katrina:

• Google Maps adds satellite imagery of post-Katrina New Orleans. The imagery is from August 31st--enable it by clicking on the red "Katrina" button beside "Satellite", "Map", and "Hybrid". Check out the Superdome as an example of before and after. Yowzers.
• New Orleans flood map with depth information (powered by MySQL and AJAX). This is amazing to play with, because the depth information gives you context for your before-and-after views of the landscape in Google Maps. "Oh wow, that sheen is actually 7ft of water!" moments abound. This is via Kathryn Cramer who is using Google Maps and these sites to help New Orleans residents determine what happened to their home. She also links to Levee water-level maps.
• Feedmarker lets you bookmark Google Maps. Internally they use GPX instead of GeoRSS. Externally, it's interesting to be able to bookmark a place in its social context (a trip, your walk, cultural highlights of a town, ex-girlfriends, etc.).
• Adrian Holovaty of Chicago Crime, has added Google Maps to the newspaper he works for. It's the first example of Google Maps within a story on a traditional news site, he believes.
• Dig a Hole Through the Earth with Google Maps. From my house in New Zealand, I end up just off the coast of Spain, near Gibraltar. From my soon-to-be-former house in Colorado, I end up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This reminds me of the see-through-the-earth app that Squid Labs demonstrated at Where 2.0. It's obvious that the reality of a spherical globe is still not ingrained in our world view, so anything that reveals the sphere catches our attention.