Sound Transit: Riding the Bing Maps Wave

SoundTransit_0Sound Transit has launched their new public transit system featuring Bing Maps and leveraging their repository of public transit information to create a trip planner for Seattleites to get around town. The application allows users to put in origin and destination addresses, set the date and time (defaulting to the current date/time) and start planning their trip. So, let’s say I wanted to travel from the Bellevue Art Museum (510 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, WA) to the Seattle Art Museum (1300 1ST AVE, Seattle) – working on that Warhol foursquare badge. So, I input the respective locations, click “Plan Trip” and out pops a map with the full route charted right across the 520 bridge. They’ll soon need to account for the tolls…anyway. Grrr.

SoundTransit_1

The results also include several options with travel time, start and end times, the cost of the trip, the route numbers you’ll need to take, plus any transfers required to get from one museum to the other. Upon drilling down into the trips, you’ll see that there are actually different prices per rider type (adult, youth and senior/disabled) and whether or not you can use your ORCA card (One Region Card for All – basically, one card for all public transportation around Seattle). One of the many perks of being a Microsoft employee is a free ORCA card, so come work for us (!!) or ask more Microsoft people why they aren’t using public transportation since it’s free and there’s a kick ass Microsoft system powering the Sound Transit Trip Planner…just sayin’.

I digress.

Finally, in the trip planner, you’ll also see the distance you may have to walk in the rain (eek!) and then step-by-step driving directions with times included and the transit system which powers the mode of transport.

You’ll also notice some markers on the map. In addition to the route line and stops, there are buttons to enable Fare Outlets (for buying passes) and Park and Rides pinned to the map. These will be quite useful in our attempts to stop the insanity of $4 per gallon gas and global warming. A great addition to the Bing Maps Customer Showcase and a win for Sound Transit riders around Puget Sound.

Don’t live in Seattle? Build your own transit app. Sign up at the Bing Maps Portal.

It’s Tax Time but Don’t Search for the IRS in Sturgis MI

It’s tax time so folks all across the US are calling the IRS with questions. Where are many of them getting the number? Well Google of course.

If you live in Sturgis, MI (population 10,696) though you need to be careful. If you search for the IRS in Sturgis, you will be given the local airport instead whose 3 letter airport code is… IRS. If you call the number you might just can earful rather than helpful tax advise. Ah the power (and the pain) of Local Search.

From the forum (bold is mine):

IRS is the airport code for Sturgis, MI. It comes up in google search/maps & everyone is calling us for their taxes!!!!

About 2 months ago we started receiving phone calls from individuals wanting to contact the Internal Revenue Service. We are the Kirsch Municipal Airport located in Sturgis, MI and our FAA Airport code is IRS. Somehow, when people google search/map IRS – our information comes up – not the Internal Revenue Service. We get 20-50 calls a day for the Internal Revenue Service – even after hours and on weekends.

2 weeks ago, I sent several report a problem issues to google maps – with no response from them. I have sent them several every day since – with no response from them. I rated it a bad rating with information why also.

Last week I figured out how to request a change to the information on google maps. I submitted the change and received a response that said they’d look at it an let me know. Still – no answer.

I am sooo fed up with this issue and please help me fix it asap! Thanks!

The problem points out not just the power of having a popular search term ranked highly in local but the frustration felt by those on the wrong end of the accuracy issue and the struggle that novice users find with Google’s interface. The user discovered the report a problem link, then went on to the community edit. She has yet to find the claim link but hopefully that will occur shortly.

Google Search: More powerful collaboration

Until now, CSE has had a simple collaboration feature that lets the owner of a custom search engine invite friends or colleagues to contribute sites, and assign labels to these sites. This was useful in expanding the scope of a search engine, but beyond expanding indexing, it limited what collaborators were able to do.

Starting today, we’re replacing the current collaboration options with more powerful shared administration features. Through Admin accounts, a new tab in your control panel, you can now invite collaborators to become shared administrators. Admin accounts have capabilities similar to those of the owner, but they cannot access the Make Money (advertising) tab or create additional admin accounts.

In line with these enhancements, we will be removing the Collaboration tab in a month. In the mean time, as an owner of a custom search engine, you can easily migrate existing sites from the Collaboration tab to your search engine definition and, if you like, upgrade existing collaborators to Admin accounts to give them shared administrator privileges. When we remove the Collaboration tab we will automatically migrate all sites but will not automatically upgrade all collaborators to admin accounts – so if you do want to keep existing collaborators on your site we recommend you migrate them today, or you can add them back manually later.

We hope you’ll find these shared admin capabilities more powerful. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.