Topix Nabs 6 Content Partners To Become Local Info Hub - Topix is already one of the best websites for local news, but when they integrate all of this new content (events, classifieds, business listings, etc.) they will have made a serious move ahead in the (hyper)local space.
And of course, local is where everything is at.
Okay, so I am cheating a bit here. Rather than writing a new post, I’m linking to a page on my wiki where I have been collecting links for several years already: mfagan wiki / waterloo geo stuff.
Back when I started UWhub (now largely defunct) it was first going to be a mapping site for the area around campus. Then I decided it would be easier to make just regular web search first, then add a search with a geographic component (e.g. housing search), at which point I would add the map. Apparently a search engine can be a lot of work 
so I never got past that. But since the beginning there I have been collecting links for tools and resources for mapping the University of Waterloo, the city itself, etc. At some point it moved from a text file to a spot on my wiki, and I cleaned up and edited a lot of it recently. I have also dumped some other things on the page that don’t have much to do with mapping.
So that was a long prelude to me pointing out that that page is an extremely useful and comprehensive resource. While it is very unlikely I will actually put all the data into a single map site, the collection of links by itself is great. It includes lots of maps, at various scales (one classroom within the school, the entire world…), and tons of other data sources that can be mapped in some way, such as businesses, transit, housing, news, jobs, etc. It includes a lot of resources most people didn’t know existed, from health inspection records for all food outlets in the region, maps of crimes in the area by week and crime type, interactive maps with high resolution aerial imagery from multiple different years, geological data, historical and future maps, detailed maps of the all the floors of all the UW libraries, etc. And I keep finding new things to add, let me know if you see things I’m missing. I will definitely reference some of these links on a later post about the city.
EveryBlock: A news feed for your block. - if anyone actually follows my del.icio.us bookmarks, you’ll notice how interested I am in the hyperlocal. While EveryBlock has very limited coverage today (three US cities), it may be the closest yet to what I am thinking towards.
‘Farm market’ opening this week
Student enthusiasts have teamed up with Food Services to create the UW Farm Market, which will open for the first time this Wednesday, selling local produce as well as other products from the area, brought in mainly from the Elmira Produce Auction Cooperative.
excellent
MapCruncher turns static images into tiles suitable for use with Microsoft Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local), and presumably other tile-based mapping applications too. Very neat and useful, the existing hacks I’d seen to handle this on Google’s map API were relatively poor. Via VE blog.