지도*
Saturday, November 29, 2008 at 9:14 AM Look! It's Gangnam Station!
The K-Times reports that Google has FINALLY released a version of Google Maps for Korea.
No support for maps on iPod touch though (and iPhone iGuess I guess).
But is it useful? Contrast the map of Gangnam above with this one of downtown Auckland:
What's missing on the Korean one? Street names. One of the vagaries of Korea is the absence of street names. While Gangnam is currently in the throws of labelling each street in the Gu(구) the designations are hardly imaginative. My old apartment was on 남77길 - literally South 77th Street.
You can however search in the accepted Korean format of City, Gu, Dong and postal number and get a reasonable result. Likewise most large or prominent things can be found by a search string. A search for CGV will pop up every CGV cinema in Seoul.
The level of detail is not as good as Korean online maps, I would recommend Daum's maps - mostly because they open in Firefox and Chrome. Here's Daum's version of Gangnam Station:
지도를 클릭하시면 위치정보를 확인하실 수 있습니다.
A little more useful in terms of finding the bank.
However this marks an important step by Google when it comes to it's operations in Korea. What DOES make the Google Korea implementation of Maps is of course Google's API (Or Application Programmig Interface) essentially allowing users to appropriate the information in Google maps and adapt it for various uses. By contrast most Korean maps will only give you a snapshot like the one above. Not very interactive in it's embedded form.
Of course this isn't an altruistic Google making life easier for those of us in Korea: (Emphasis mine).
Google Korea (www.google.co.kr) announced the release of the local version of ``Google Maps,'' a free location service based on interactive Web maps and photographic imagery, which company officials hope will help drive more traffic to its search engine.
It's all about the ads people!
*Map
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