Filed under: Fun, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Freeware
Placeopedia: Putting Wikipedia articles on the map
by Jordan Running Sep 19th 2005 at 2:20PM
Placeopedia is a brilliantly-executed Google Maps-powered site which aims to create a map of all the articles in Wikipedia which correspond to a real-world location. The site is attractive and slick and adding a new place from Wikipedia is extremely easy: you just start typing the name of an article and Placeopedia autocompletes as you type—a functionality that should be built into Wikipedia (Greasemonkey, anyone?)—and then you click on the corresponding location on the map. There's also RSS and raw XML data for the 50 most recently-added places as well as KML files for Google Earth. My only gripe with Placeopedia is that you have to click on a link in a confirmation e-mail after every single place you add; perhaps a necessary evil, but it would be nice to be able to add, say, five at a time.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
