Google’s April Fools Day joke this year is great.  Play PacMan to your heart’s content on the streets of your city in Google Maps!

That of course includes Decatur.

Click this link to head on over and start playing Pac Man around Decatur Square right now!  (The loop around the Old Courthouse makes the whole game extra tricky.)

If you want to play another area, you can leave the PacMan overlay, adjust your location and then click the Pac Man icon in the lower-left corner.

Happy chomping!

Troy sends along these great screen grabs from Google’s April Fools Day 8-Bit Google Maps.  Click them to enlarge.  Hilarious…

Want to see for yourself?   Head over to Google Maps and click the “Quest” option in the upper-right corner.

Watch and marvel as I jump from electric cars to Atlanta beer in just three sentences!

Did you know that if you type “ev charging station” and your zipcode into Google Maps, it will now spit back the nearby locations of charging stations for electric cars?

The current map of Atlanta shows charging stations in some pretty random locations.  Like Georgia Power’s Corporate HQ, Weego Electric Cars, Northlake Mall (?), Jim Ellis “Auto Dealership”, Atlanta Segway Tours, Hartsfield Airport and Costco’s Morrow and Perimeter locations.  What a motley crew!

And if electric ain’t your game, but carbon emissions drive you insane – don’t forget about the bio-diesel station just west of Decatur on Arizona Ave.

And speaking of bio-fuel, researchers at Cornell report that they are hoping to use new knowledge about brewery waste to one day produce a new kind of bio-fuel.

And speaking of breweries, have you heard about Sweetwater’s recently announced expansion?

That’s right folks.  The very same revolution that is reported ad nauseum by the press, about the press, is also taking place in an equally ancient medium: maps.

Tell me this blurb from the New York Times story about “geo-volunteerism” doesn’t sound like it fell right off the back of the paper wagon…

But Tele Atlas says its customers, who might be in delivery trucks or emergency vehicles, can’t rely fully on community-created maps, any more than historians can rely on Wikipedia.

“Most of our customers expect a level of due diligence and quality that is way more than what a community is going to put together,” said Patrick McDevitt, vice president of global engineering at Tele Atlas.

Defenders of the amateur approach point out that professionally created maps often have errors and can be slow to add road closures and other updates. Google has moderators who try to verify the accuracy of users’ changes, unless they are very minor, while OpenStreetMap relies on its members to police changes.

A statement about the “level of due diligence and quality” could just as easily come from the mouth of a hardened traditional journalist, while the retort could have rolled off the tongue of a sassy, Buddy Holly-esque blogger.

Every once in a while it’s helpful to remember that this dramatic shift is much bigger than just “news”.  It’s about the future of all printed information.  No single industry (or company) should deny that kind of flood.  Sink or swim.

But enough pontificating.  The best part about the article?  Decaturite John Kittle Jr. gets a shout-out!

Don’t use Google Maps for directions because you don’t have a car? Well, that’s all changed!

Ryan points out that Google Maps now offers directions that can include public transit options at your request.

After asking for directions between any two points, just click the “Public Transit” option to the upper left.

Typing in zip codes for Decatur and downtown Atlanta, Google tells me how many minutes it takes to walk to the station, gives the departure times for 3 upcoming MARTA trains, the number and arrival time of the bus I need to hop after getting off the train, and finally the final walking time to my destination!

Another great Google innovation! Did MARTA just get a little easier?

(And yes, I know MARTA has a similar feature on their website, but trust me…they don’t compare)