As a kid, I used to love looking at maps. I’d sneak them out of the kitchen junk drawer, and take them to my room to look at and imagine magical journeys. In college, for a short time, I had a student job on campus creating maps of the local wetlands, and I thought I was the coolest geek around. And though maps aren’t something I spend a lot of time with now, I still get a kick out of them – especially now that maps mashups make them even more useful, more cool, and almost sexy.

So I’ve decided to showcase a dozen 16 cool, useful, and maybe even sexy map mashups that should get at least a few geo-geeks’ hearts pounding. Here they are:

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Visual and/or Educational Place Maps

360 Cities – The World In Virtual Reality is a visual stunner with 360-degree panoramas of over 50 world cities and 6000 panoramas. I love learning through visual immersion. It’s the next best thing to being there.

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Cool Maps – 7 Wonders of the World – Not just the ancient 7 wonders of the world, or even just the ancient plus the new 7 wonders of the world – oh no – this site wants to educate everyone on all sorts of wonders, including natural wonders, underwater wonders, strange wonders, local wonders and well…just go see for yourself.

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Interactive Climate Map One of the most fundamental aspects about any location is its climate, and a geo-education just wouldn’t be an education without some climate facts. Besides, no travel fantasy is complete without a true visualization of average temperature and precipitation for the region.

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Q&A – Where Am I? How Far Is It?

Geo IP Tool – I don’t know any geeks who don’t like to map a location based on IP address and/or domain name. So here’s a tool to do just that – complete with longitude and latitude info.

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Map Tunneling Tool – You know how your momma used to tell you to stop digging a hole or you’ll dig straight to China? Well, if you ever wondered if you would really end up in China, or somewhere else, if you really dug straight down to the other side of the Earth, you can use this useless, but cool map app to find out exactly where you’d come out of that hole. Just pure, silly fun.

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Tall Eye hopes to help you figure out the burning question, “If I walk in a straight line, around the world, where will I pass?” It admits to not being necessarily completely accurate, but it’s “close enough” for fun.

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How Far Does Santa Have To Travel is the ultimate Q&A map app. Who doesn’t need to know how far Santa has to travel to deliver presents right to his or her house? That burning question…answered.

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DIY Map Apps

QuikMaps for the do it yourself’er who wants to make her own maps, and doodle on it too! Nicely integrates into a number of places including your site, Google Earth, or even your GPS.

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Blipstar is for creating store locators. Got a business web site, and want to help people find your brick-and-mortar store(s)? Blipstar’s got you covered.

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evensites helps you organize events and meetups, complete with maps and info. It’s got all the ajaxy-goodness you can handle, for the ultimate in geek programming thrill rides. And like any good web 2.0 app, it’s … in beta.

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Map Builder does just what it sounds like it does; it lets you build maps. But of course, it sounds cooler the way it’s described on the site, “Rapid mashup development tool for Google and Yahoo maps”.

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Geotag your blog, site or RSS feed, so other apps can mashup your site with their geolocation tools. Just enter your location data into this simple tool, and you’ll get all the code you need to include on your site or in your feed. Tag it, baby!

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Fun, Miscellaneous Map Apps

Baby Name Map maps the most popular baby names of the year across the world. This is a cool use of the technology. Everyone loves searching for baby names, but this adds just that extra twist to make it just a little different.

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MyVox is a map integrated with voice recording…or something like that. Look, I’m actually not completely sure how this one works, but it just sounds cool, so if you think it would be cool to add voice to those little map pushpins, then this app might be just what you need.

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The next two are almost identical, but I couldn’t decide which I liked better, so you get to choose from both!

Twittervision possibly has the better name, but like the next one, it’s function is to show public tweets (from twitter.com) on a scrolling world map. Fun for Twitterers.

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Twitter Spy, like Twittervision, lets you see public tweets geographically. This one shows several at a time though, which gets a thumbs up from me.

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And that’s my list of cool, useful, and/or fun map apps. Hope you enjoy them.

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