In the past, let's say you wanted to look for an apartment. You would take your newspaper, circle the ads that looked promising, and write down the addresses, if they even appeared. Then you would look up the locations on a map and either plot the points, write down driving directions, or both.
Now, if you're in a major U.S. city, all you have to do is go to Housingmaps.com, select a price range, and voila--you get a map showing the location of each rental with a link to more specific information, including contact details, and a link that opens up your e-mail program. Some of the map icons even include photos.
Here's another comparison. You're visiting an unfamiliar city and yon want to find Wi-Fi spots. You don't know the streets or the businesses near your hotel. In the past, you might ask at the front desk and get directions to an Internet cafe that offered Wi-Fi. Now you enter the address of the hotel and the term "Wi-Fi" into Google Maps' Local search and get not only a list of appropriate locations, but a map of them too. Need driving directions? Just click.
On the Internet, a number of Web sites offer satellite and aerial photos of almost any world area - just click on a map and zoom in. For the ultimate aerial view, you can see what the Earth would look like to Martians. Photos taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft reduce our complicated planet to a small bluish ball with a little white moon close by.
The area imagery you'll find on such Web sites as TerraServer (terraserver.com), GlobeXplorer (globexplorer.com), MapMart (mapmart.com) or Google's Keyhole service (keyhole.com) isn't art, but it can be fun to play around with. Images are available at all different scales and resolutions, in color or black and white, in various digital or hard-copy forms. Type in a ZIP code, an address, or zoom in from a regional map. Fees and access vary. Most parts of the Earth have been photographed from one altitude or another, so you're almost certain to find your street and maybe your house.
If you're interested in making your own aerial photographs but don't have access to a plane or a helicopter, you might consider kite aerial photography. It's become a worldwide hobby. In fact, the current need in aerial imagery is in the 500-feet-and-below range, a zone where aircraft can't always be used but where kites can operate freely. Enthusiastic kite aerial photographers share techniques and swap photos on the Internet (A good jumping-off point: bults.net/kapnet).
A click of the mouse gives you an aerial photo of the neighbourhood area you want. It is also a most dangerous development for the realtor industry. Housingmaps .com by itself won't be enough to break the cartel. But there's the makings of a low-price business model in there somewhere. All that's needed is someone who has the vision, energy and marketing skills to bring it to life. A Charles E. Schwab of real-estate. Done right, a potent discount realtor sector could emerge overnight, in the same way that Schwab created the discount stockbroker industry a few decades ago.
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Rachel loves referencing and mapping especially with today's technology and satellite assistance. Check out her new aerial map reference here: Aerial Maps.
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