For several completely unrelated reasons, I've spent a lot of time looking at and thinking about maps this week.

• GeoNames, a database of places (as used by Dopplr)
• Vodafone have a cute map, Twitter-driven (obviously) of who's going on holiday where, this summer;
• A mind-expanding article on augmenting photographic data, courtesy of pitch/yaw/roll, GPS and OpenStreetmap;
• First person UIs - who'da thunk that a simple compass opens up so many possibilities? I note that whilst JSR179 has included compass support in the location APIs, compasses were the bit that most implementations of the standard failed to include for a long time...
• The Google static maps API - handy when you're targeting platforms that don't let you do all the usual Googly JavaScript stuff;