Taken here.

(click on image for full size)

I thought it might be fun to keep a record of all the slopes I ski and, as I had not played around with Virtual Earth Collections, I thought I would try using these.

So basically I created my collection in maps.live.com, digitising a line for each route.  Once created, these are hosted for me under my LiveID:

If you go to this link you can explore my ski route collection it in all it’s 3D glory!

What is cool is that you can create your own videos of a 3D tour really easily in VE.  So here it is:

I love the way this gives a rich 3D view of the slopes (which are not very steep yet!).  Ok, so there is no snow, but you can’t have everything!

Oh, and for some schadenfreude see:

One of my favourite trips in Innsbruck is a trip on the Stubaitalbahn.  This is a tram that winds it way out of Innsbruck and into the alpine Stubaital valley and is also a great way of getting into the mountains for some fantastic walking.  It is quite intriguing how the tram winds its way around the mountainsides to make it up to the village of Fulpmes.  So I thought it would be interesting to create a VE mashup to see the route on a map and most importantly in 3D.

So here is my mashup.

Although it looks good in 2D:

It only really comes to life when you switch to the 3D view:

So how did I make this?

Well I used MapCruncher.  MapCruncher is a great free Microsoft tool to take a map image, georectify it and then chop into automatically into tiles which match the Virtual Earth tile specification.  It then generates a sample mashup application for you which you can easily modify to you needs.

Essentially I found a map of the line here and imported it into MapCruncher.  I then had to match points that correspond on your map and the Virtual Earth mapping.  I this case I set about 20 points along the track, at the edge of bends or stations:

Next I set the white areas of the map image as transparent. Then all I had to do is render the tiles using the renderer:

Simple!

For more help there are resources on the MapCruncher site and this video gives a good overview.

Now I only need to get some photosynths done of the trams and I’m a fully fledged tram-spotter….

The Telegraph newspaper has a good story suggesting traditional map reading is a dying skill due to the increasing use of web mapping and sat navs.  I was impressed with how well researched it was. 

I spend a lot of time walking in the mountains and still feel that paper maps and magnetic compass are still the best ‘interface’ for hiking (and I have shunned GPS so far).  OK so call me a Luddite…  But, navigation in urban areas is a different story where I want to use more current technologies as the environment changes faster and I want to search rich data.  For example an Ordnance Survey Landranger map is not much use for finding deep crust pizza in London, but a mapping client on my mobile is.  So perhaps we are entering a new urban/rural divide with new mapping/navigation technologies? 

But web mapping can still cover traditional cartography too.  What this story (and the similar bbc story) missed, was the fact that you can access ‘traditional’ cartography on Web Mapping.  For example on multimap.com you can use Ordnance Survey mapping (see this example) and Bartholomew’s mapping (see).  These will show: “…landmarks such as the Science Museum, Royal Albert Hall and the Natural History Museum, which could not be found on Google Maps.”

It also worth looking at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7587415.stm for a good debate on this where Adrian Miles puts up a spirited defence of web mapping (and even touches on the Free Our Data debate!)

Update

A good forum debate on the BBC site has started here

Ed Parsons has leapt to the defence of web mapping against those old school cartographers here. 

Mit diesem Blick von meinem Schreibtisch: