Have you seen this?! A new feature has been added to Google Maps since I last played around with it, called Street View. It's exactly what it sounds like. Panoramic images have been taken of nearly ever major street in several American cities (San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver, and Miami, it looks like), and then overlaid onto the existing Google Maps street grid. Now when searching for an address, you can actually see what it looks like from ground level. And using the arrows overlaid on the street itself, you can actually navigate, a virtual walkthrough of the neighborhood.

This would have been hugely usefull when writing the NYC scenes of my X-Men novel last fall. And you'd better bet that I'll be using it heavily if I write anything in the cities covered by the feature.

Of course, I'm a geek, so I immediately started fiddling around with it.

Want to see where Doctor Strange's place in Greenwich Village would be, if it actually existed? Here you go.

How about the apartment in San Francisco that Matt Sturges and I shared back in the mid-90s? Here it is. (Sadly Borderlands Books and the McSweeney's pirate store, both of which are only steps away from this address, didn't move in until after we'd moved out.)

How about where Kong fell?

Okay, I've got to stop playing with this now...