Results tagged “googlemaps”

Buses are everywhere and go everywhere in this city. But for those of us less familiar with the system, it can be tough to puzzle out which ones we can actually use. Well... did you know that Google Maps now shows exactly where the various bus lines running around the Shanghai area stop? Even though ditu.google.com is in Chinese, it's bound to be a great resource for anyone who lives more than a ten minute walk from a subway station. Hurrah!

This service, located at ditu.google.cn, has replaced Google Local, which was at bendi.google.cn. First off, there's a couple of big differences between this and Google Maps for the US. You can't use satellite or hybrid mode in the Chinese version. If you want a satellite you have to go back to using Google Earth or other such sites, and of course it's hard to find your way there because all you see are blotches of rooftops. Ditu.google.cn just has the regular graphics.

It won't be long before the map is a lot more crowded.

So, go ahead: Describe your Shanghai to the rest of the Earth. (And would someone please get working on the Google Maps mashup that labels all of the city's WiFi hotspots?)

Nadnerb, a commenter on our "Center of Shanghai" post from yesterday, pointed out that the trapezoidal building in this Google Maps satellite shot was the old Jingwen Flower Market:

Back in February, Wired Magazine ran a story on the center of the USA according to Google Maps. The -ist network of sites, being geographically organized, was quick to pick up on this meme, giving us the center of New York and of Washington D.C..

Online do-it-yourself encyclopedia Wikipedia, every lazy blogger's best friend, will not load in Shanghai without the aid of a proxy server. The site worked yesterday. Most assume the free information source has been blocked by the Chinese government. We can't imagine why. Shanghaiist hopes this is just a temporary glitch, but then we just read this and now wonder if we should care.

Shanghaiist is pissed -- the Chinese government has closed down three internet sites, one of which, Yannan, was one of our favorite sites for information and intelligent analysis of major social and political issues in China. The other two sites are Inner Mongolian, and theur only crime was to protest what they probably considered a racist cartoon that featured Genghis Khan as a mouse with a pig snout. We haven't seen these sites, but they have been accused of hosting "separatist" content and were summarily shut down and China warned it would do last week.