I can annotate my house from here

Platial: the People's Atlas (still in beta, one should note, but making a pretty good show of itself nonetheless) is a very neat repurposing of Google Maps to allow people to annotate the maps with their own points of interest.  Being able to mark your own house on Google is pretty cool (and of course, I did so, as shown to the right) but that's only part of what makes this site interesting.

Platial actually lets you create and share your own maps.  The Activist Atlas is a listing of all the developing maps of points like public biodiesel stations, green buildings, vegetarian restaurants in Liverpool, community gardens... ah, yeah, now this is starting to sound like a really exciting use of the technology.

It's pretty easy to both get around the site and add your own material (although I was somewhat annoyed that I found my house, was told I had to log in to claim the area, and then lost the map point during registration, so I had to hunt it down again - which was kind of annoying because I couldn't, being Canadian and therefore under-represented in Google Maps, just type in my street address).  The idea of individual maps for everything is good, although it would also be handy to be able to overlay multiple maps (condensing, say, bike paths, vegan restaurants, and good lavatories onto one map) and especially useful if one could then download them to, say, one's PDA or GPS system.  I'm not sure if it's possible to do these things or not, but if not, those are upgrades I'd like to see.  But very good beginning, guys, keep it up.

[Gabrielle Taylor]