While everyone else has been ga-ga over Google Earth and the satellite pictures, I have been equally thrilled with the blockview feature of Amazon’s A9 local search engine. Linked below an article about how they’re making it happen.

Still a few kinks to work out. If you look here, you’ll see a picture of my favorite coffee shop, Kaveh Kanes, but it’s identified as Treebeard’s because they have their offices on the floor above the coffee shop. The restaurant’s actually a couple of blocks away.

Wired News: Riding With the Urban Mappers by Jeff MacIntyre

A9.com’s trucks have been rolling for about a year now. They have already photo-mapped 20 major American cities (with a bank of 30 million images) as part of an aggressive rollout, capturing, by their estimate, storefront images for 1 million of the 14 million small businesses in the United States. The two-vehicle fleet is currently barreling through New Mexico and Minnesota.

The truck itself is fairly innocuous. A FireWire cable snakes up from a rear door window to a roof-mounted storage box. Peering out from an opening in the right side of the box is a consumer-grade digital video camera, which is running constantly.