Back “in the old days” when you were lost you’d stop at a gas station and ask the attendant for directions. Here in New Jersey we still have the luxury of having an attendant come to our car when we pull in, but in the rest of the states where they have self-serve gas, you’d be hard pressed to find an attendant. You swipe your card, pump your gas and go.

Luckily, getting lost isn’t much of a problem now that we have GPS, cell phones and Google Maps. But now things have gone full circle. If you leave home and forget to map your route first, you can pull into a gas station and ask the pump for directions thanks to an internet connection and Google Maps.

read more on Engadget | digg story

While looking for something using Google a few minutes ago, I stumbled upon a little Easter… errr… should I call it a Christmas Egg?

Do a search for “Christmas” or anything else that generates Christmas themed ads on the right side and you’ll see a row of Christmas trees along side your results.

Click here to see for yourself.

Following up on a post from about six months ago (see post here), Googgle has finally released a MAcintosh version of it’s very cool Google Earth software. It requires MacOS X 10.4 Tiger to run, so I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but kudos to Google for getting a Mac version out there.

Get it now at earth.google.com

So these two guys form a little company and call it Google. A few years later they buy themselves a personal jet. This might sound normal until you realize that the jet is a Boeing 767!

Check it out in Silicon Beat.

I mentioned before that I started using Google Sitemaps to give my site better representation in Google’s search results. I thought I’d give you an update on my experience so far.

First, my site is getting crawled more often. However, I don’t know how often because my webhost apparently is having a problem keeping my site logs working. But based on the reports from Google, the site is getting crawled. I’ve added some new HTML to the site that allow Google to find more of my pages.

However, the results have been kind of odd. Many of my pages have been turned into supplemental reults and now some are going URL only. I’ll keep you posted on whether this problem works itself out as Googlebot crawls my site more!

I’ve mentioned Google Maps before, but I thought I’d point out that they just added a “hybrid” feature where you can overlay maps and satellite images. I’ve been saying they should add this. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought so because they finally did it.

Using I set up my site with Google’s new service, Google Sitemaps. It should result in better indexing of my site by Google. This means you’ll get more accurate results and some of the lag I’ve mentioned before will no longer be a problem when I make changes.

Everyone knows that Google is the best site to use for searching, but Google is slowly becoming a huge company that offers a wide array of services. the coolest new one that I’ve seen recently is Google Earth. It’s not web-based, but is an application you can download and install. If you’ve used Google Maps, you already know that Google bought out Keyhole and now has satellite imagery available. Google Earth takes this one step farther. In this program you can zoom through maps, and use them in all kinds of ways. It even has 3 dimensional representations of buildings so you can fly through cities.

It’s tough to explain all the useful features, but once you download it it you’ll see how much fun it is to play with even if you don’t have a serious use for it.

Oh yeah, and it’s free. Get it at http://earth.google.com.

If you’ve tried using the Google Search box on my homepage lately, you may have noticed a lot of broken results. When I updated my site, I changed the directory structure and until the Googlebot crawls my site again, Google’s indexing still points to the old files. They usually crawl the site at least once a month so you should see it updated anytime now.