Bikes / Key ingredients for interactive bike maps of the future
ByCycle and Bikely both bring bike route mapping to the web, and not a minute too soon. Finding bike routes through cities (especially unfamiliar cities) can be a lonely, scary process of elimination. After much experimentation, the best route often ends up being a patchwork of quiet side streets, alleys, and paths that would be impossible to piece together in advance on a map. Ideally, you'd get to share ideas and information with other cyclists when you're trying to, say, get from the Mission to the Exploratorium for the first time. Yeah, straight up Van Ness is probably not the best way, even though it looks like it on the map.
Online communities to the rescue, right? MySpace and Wikipedia are doing something right; they've both found ways to tap into the motivations of a particular group of people, providing forums to share information and build connections. Exactly what each has done right is anyone's guess. MySpace is ugly, confusing, often annoyingly inconsistent, and generally unusable. Wikipedia is unreliable, badly written and pretty much a total free-for-all. So the ... read on »
16 Aug 06 · filed under: bikes, ixd · 
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