We get email: from Oleksij Rak of Altopix

What's Altopix?

It's a new company that's created a directory called "The Maps Explorer" featuring interesting Google maps.

Apparently just outa beta — or maybe still in beta, who really knows and what does beta mean anymore, I mean, consider Gmail... — and way too sophisto for moi but not for you, smart girls and boys.

I've decided that the key to blogging success is to have readers who are smarter than I am.

I can't miss.

Here's Oleksij's email, which came in yesterday afternoon.

Greetings to anesthesiologists :), Sorry, don’t know your name. Joe?

I was browsing your blog - http://www.bookofjoe.com - and discovered that once you were interested in Google maps-related resources.

We’ve created a directory of interesting Google maps locations and are planning to extend it to scholar geography purposes (some teachers contacted us with this idea) and maybe create some universal geo informational directory.

Currently it's just a rather large directory of locations with previews.…

So… if you are interested, that may be just another theme for your blog :)

Take a look at http://www.explorer.altopix.com/

And, btw, we are planning to start collecting url geographical locations.

We didn’t create any UI for that yet but feel free to email me location (longitude/latitude, country, state and city) of your site(s) and I’ll add it(them) as another location in our directory.


Best wishes,
Feel free to contact me,

Oleksij Rak
The Altopix Team

Interesting, isn't it, how both Google and the iPod have spawned immensely popular spin–offs created by people who've taken the platform and used it as a launching pad for a zillion and one unanticipated applications?

How do you spell podcast?

What's most fascinating to me about these thousand–and–one extensions is that the base can be either a piece of software or hardware: it really doesn't matter anymore if an idea originates with bits or atoms.

Oleksij Rak — now there's a name to conjure with....