As you may know I have a keen interest in all that is Web 2.0 and 3.0 too of course. And I am never short of new things to look at and check out partly because of my own research but largely too down to my good friend and colleague, Michael (Held).
Yesterday Michael sent me a link to EveryBlock. It is limited to a view cities in the US however, but whilst I was looking at it I was reminded of an exciting week I spent in New York in September 1992 - a week which turned out to be the first week of a 14 month tour of the usual round-the-world backpacker haunts.
So, remembering this week, I was checking out the site and, with the help of Google Maps, remembered and located the street where I stayed in New York - Vestry Street - a very cool street of Artists Lofts in the particularly cool area of SoHo. As I was surfing Google Maps, I noticed a feature I hadn't used before - Street View. You will find this as an additional button top right. Using this features means you can view street level photos of all streets highlighted. Now for Manhattan this looked pretty comprehensive but (although I am not sure) this feature is currently limited to a few major metropolis's in the US. I did check London, for example, and it was not available.
Now people talk about community when it comes to 2.0 and Crowd sourcing and all the rest of it. And very often the talk is about applications around the network of course but for me, very often, I find the use of 2.0 stuff very emotional. For twenty minutes yesterday I relived some wonderful memories of my time in New York at the beginning of my trip and being able to 'virtually' walk the streets around where I stayed using the feature in Google Maps was really quite wonderful.
I have bookmarked the address - the Block - in NYC that I have now been gently reminded of, allowed to explore and live again and, by using EveryBlock , will keep up with the latest graffiti reports, crimes and other happenings of that few hundred yards of New York street.
