Best
Application for a Place I Never Heard Of
Bundaberg City Guide
With Zululand giving them a run for the money, the nod has to go to
Bundaberg.See, contests can be fun and educational.
http://www.bundaberg.qld.gov.au/map/
Best
Raster Imagery Application
Davis Streetmap
A nice user interface, high quality raster imagery and good registration
of the vector overlay combine to form a great online mapping experience.
I've never been to Davis, don't know where in California it is, but I sure
spent a lot of time tooling around the neighborhood with this app.
http://www.ci.davis.ca.us/gis/streetmap/index.cfm
Most
Misleading Name for an Application
Weed and Seed
Fajissel ma shnizel.I felt for sure Snoop Dog himself was behind this
one.But a closer look revealed that in irony of ironies it's actually
the man at work.Watch your back Dog.
http://www.weedandseeddatacenter.org/map.aspx
Best
Eye Candy
John Wayne Airport Monitor
Let it run for a few minutes and your screen will fill with the colorful
trails of Commercial air traffics real-time positions.Fascinating.
http://www4.passur.com/sna.html
Most
Bang for the Buck
MobileMaps
There were a number of entries built on freeware and open source products.
The best of the bunch was MobileMaps, a location based search engine for
the state of California.Where this MapServer/MySql/Perl concoction suffers
in map presentation, it makes up for it in concept, ingenuity and creativity.
I'd like to see them push this further.
http://www.mobilemaps.com/
Best
Homegrown Map Renderer
With so many commercial map renderers for the web available, I was
surprised to see a number of entries built on home made renderers.My favorite
is the eGuide directory for Singapore.Its biggest problem was that many
times I went to use it, it was unavailable or serving broken maps, but
when it was working, it served up a decent looking map.
http://www.eguide.com.sg/
Application
From the Guy With the Most Time On His hands.
Lunar Mapper
What was this guy thinking? Back to work Pendelton.
http://demo.mappoint.net/lunarrealestate/earthtomoon.aspx
Biggest
Tease
Ask the Spider
The Spider caught my attention with a nicely ray traced animation on
his home page.Once inside, he further sucked me in, proclaimed the lofty
goals of "soon becoming part of my life" and "Linking all of the actors
of the geo-internet together".I was intrigued.So I asked.He would run
off to his lair repeatedly for long periods, returning only to tell me
that nothing was found.I remain curious and will track the spider closely
in the future.
http://www.askthespider.com/
Nicest
UI
Tour Santa Monica
A solid and easy to navigate Interface.Good looking maps in this ESRI
powered application, and lots of detailed points of interest.Icing on
the cake is the two grass skirted dancers who appear between map requests
to alert me that data is downloading, soothing away the wait.Kind of reminds
me of that episode of the Flintstones where Fred wins an appearance on
a TV commercial in Hawaii.His line is "Please pass the Poi".POI.Points
Of Interest.Hawaiian dancers.Get it?
http://gismap.santa-monica.org/website/tourism/viewer.htm
This years contest was a lot of fun to participate in, both as an entrant and a user of the applications submitted.I'm looking forward to next years contest, and will begin planning my entry this week.Who knows, perhaps "Where is Steve II" with a camera phone permanently strapped to my forehead transmitting images of my location back to the web to accompany the map...