As Silicon Valley is enjoying a quite nice Indian Summer, Southern California (SoCal) is getting hit by a series of wild fires. Thousands of homes have been destroyed and people have been evacuated on a massive scale.

If your geographic comprehension of SoCal doesn't go beyond Disneyland and Los Angeles, Google Maps is coming to the rescue (no pun intended).

A series of individuals as well as news organizations are maintaining maps that closely track the position of fires and evacuation zones.

24 Oct 2007

All of this is possible because Google opened the Google Maps application programming interfaces. yes, previously people could create similar maps, but today they can do so without much effort, allowing stay at home consumers to create maps that are just as informative as those done by the pros.