aotearoa

For more info, check out Transition Towns Aotearoa

i've been checking out google maps versus yahoo! maps, evaluating the best nz coverage

google gets cred for a hot flight sim built into google earth and for not lying to dutch tourists about opanuku road joining up with scenic drive. when dutch tourists are deceived, they end up breaking their rental cars on the bullbars of my clunkery old diesel, and that sux. -10000 points to some nz mapping providers for their mapping badness.

but today we're looking at yahoo!, who are predicting (note contrast between coastline in satellite pic and inlay) either severe global warming, or a catastrophic dambreak at the huia dam

what else have we learned from the mapping madness?

• yahoo has ok pics, but responds to requests for specific nz addresses with "do you mean waitakere, or waitakere?" then it sends you to waitakere township either way
• yahoo has lots of black areas across nz, and pretty much no street map ... maybe this whole yahoo!xtra thing will change that ... but would you trust xtra for directions to the corner store?
• any mapping provider gives better results than nz posts postcode finder, which still insists that piha doesn't exist, try paihia. i cannot find a single piha road that nz post know about. such a pity, given what a nice chap the postie is ...
• google maps are pretty damn good so far!

screen grab of google analytics per-country view showing viewers from within NZ the week before a New Zealand contemporary art website goes live

... but what the hell is going on a few thousand kilometres to the west? great news for artists from aotearoa, "could be worse" for tasmania i guess, potentially a tourism winner for finders island (which i never new existed until now), bit of a shame for the aussie mainland though ...

i updated our map of directions for getting here

thanks to clive for his input on the misleading hairpin

thanks to zoomin.co.nz for the map