This is probably the creepiest thing I have ever seen on Streetview. The video below shows the Streetview images of Garrido’s house, the man who kidnapped and kept a girl in captivity for 18 years. The scary thing is that the kidnapper actually follows the Goocar around in his van!

So so weird!

Found via Best Viral.

So you thought that finding a purse through Latitude was the most offbeat news this week in the geo-consumer space? Well, I have a better story for you.

You have probably heard of those two Domino’s Pizza employees who created a video where our biggest phobia about fast-food employees are re-enacted. It’s been all over the news for the past two days. Well the way those two got caught is extremely far-fetched.

First, as it was saying on the Youtube page of the video before it was taken down:

This is a great lesson on why you never post something like this on the Internet. These Domino’s workers posted this on youtube earlier today (April 13, 2009) It was removed later this day but re-uploaded because these people deserve to be fired. If you want these people fired then Favorite, comment, and rate 5 stars so the word gets out and these people fired.

So the employees posted the video online for just a few hours, before taking it down, but alas the deed was done. It was re-posted right away by somebody else, and the virality of the social Web did the rest. But that’s not it. From the video, it is pretty hard to know in which of the 6,000 stores worldwide this hoax happened. That’s where it gets good! As the ABC reports:

Readers of the consumer affairs blog consumerist.com, which posted the video early in the week, tracked Hammonds down through her YouTube account and identified the store from matching an exterior shot in a video with an image on Google maps.

I told you that was far-fetched. They matched an exterior shot of one of the employees’ video with an image on Google Maps, which made it possible to track the location of the store where the joke-gone-wrong happened. I am personally baffled. I don’t know which image search engine they used for this, but hats off! That is some military-level image search that only a pizza corporation can afford to save the reputation of its brand

So what now? Are Google mapping technologies the next crime fighter? Your neighborhood’s eye and ear? It spots your stolen purse. It detects a fart on your pizza. What’s next?

As I immersed myself into the mapping blogosphere to provide the best articles possible to Click2Map’s blog, I was surprised to find a lot of crime-related maps. Public data and maps are a good match when it comes to conveying the heavy load of socio-demographic info about a place. Looking at a crime map feels like watching Fox News: it’s a condensed summary of unfortunate events.

Through our friend Keir Clark’s Googlemapsmania.blogspot.com, I found Ucrime. Ucrime is not a new form of mapping technology. The site offers a comprehensive source of information about crimes going on around US university campuses. For students going back to school this week, and looking for a place to rent, Ucrime is a good start. Plus you can access Ucrime from your iPhone and it offers a geo-based SMS alert system.

The service was launched a month and a half ago. The product already looks finished, but I was looking for the most dangerous university campuses in the US and couldn’t find that info, nor on their site, neither on their blog. Also, to get the word out, it would have been nice to get an embed feature to paste the maps on any web page (like here).

Students are a hard to get demographic. No later than yesterday, I was talking to an early investor of AllStudentRentals.com, an off-campus housing provider for students. He explained to me how hard it was to go from university to university to create partnerships with each of them and grow on the students’ market. I also met the Founders of Uloop - the students’ marketplace - a few weeks back: they tackle the hard penetration of the universities’ population by doing aggressive on-campus guerrilla marketing coups.

Students looking for a place around campus are often leaving their parents’ house for the first time. This is a stressful experience for parents. Families want their child to move out in a secure environment. Ucrime is the perfect destination to start looking, and once again, since it’s on a map, it’s the more intuitive way to look for a place to stay.

Just for fun, I looked at the map of one of my former schools, the City College of San Francisco. Lots of shootings going in the neighborhood! (don’t forget to check the ‘user reported crimes’ box to see them appear on the map)

xavierv