Matt started Stormpulse before joining the Backyard Post team at The Palm Beach Post, so it’s cool to see the two finally come together. And though I have absolutely nothing to do with Stormpulse, seeing its mapping software embedded on The Post is personally gratifying because of the crazy, fortuitous way that I met Matt.

I was still talking ears off and hustlin’ Backyard Post around the office on April 26, 2007 when I had my first conversation with The Post’s online director about hiring a professional web developer. Literally seconds after I got back to my desk following that meeting I ran across this post about Stormpulse on the predecessor to Jason Spalding’s current site, Find GIS. That pointed me to this article at GISuser.com, and finally on to the site itself. It blew me away, so I started digging around to find out more about the people who made it. I noticed one of the guys lived in West Palm Beach, left a comment on the blog asking him to get in touch and casually mentioned later that I had just been in a meeting about hiring a programmer. Two months passed, Matt told me he was job-hunting, I went completely mental and flipped out on just about everyone in the building because he had other offers almost instantaneously, and either because of or in spite of my crazed urgency, we ended up hiring the guy. A few months later we also hired Matt’s high school classmate Peter Sheats, and here we are.

And about that “Coming soon to a site near you?” bit from the headline. The even cooler Stormpulse news is that anyone interested in embedding their tracking map on your own site can now do so. Check out the Stormpulse blog for details.

Then there’s my own neighborhood. Here’s the entrance I use, as seen in Street View:

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Buildings and stuff, right? Follow the jump to see how my neighborhood looks in Google Map’s outdated aerial view. The vantage point above will be in the lower right corner of this map, facing northwest.

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Not cool, right? Anyway, here are a couple more Palm Beach County treats. The west-facing view of The Palm Beach Post’s main office, as also featured in this previous post.

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And the private driveway leading to Rush Limbaugh’s oceanfront mansion on Palm Beach. Not a whole lot to see, though you can peek over the hedges in Virtual Earth.

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Seems like about half of the comments I’ve left on WordPress-powered blogs running Akismet lately have been diverted into the spam queue. Maybe it knows something I don’t, but I’ll just put out a friendly reminder to check your spam folder every now and then for legitimate comments.

Behold this outrageous provocation from a certain “news technologist” who works at that certain newspaper pictured above.

That’s my office you see targeted for a LOL-strike! Specifically, that green pointer is on the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of my desk, which happen to be included in my e-mail signature. (So?) This dorky map war could escalate at any moment, so stay tuned.

(If you’re interested in how my awesome airstrike map was made, and please immediately pop down to the doctor’s office to have your brain examined if you are, I did it in Google Maps, exported it as KML, then imported the KML file to Live Maps/Virtual Earth for that little extra bit of awesome. Didn’t take but six or seven hours. You’re welcome.)

Ah, but that was then, when Google was still using address interpolation as its main geocoding method. Maybe I can bug Matt into repeating the test. Until then, perhaps it’s worth noting that Google claims 50 million rooftops to Virtual Earth’s 44 million. Interesting. Your move, Microsoft.

Hit the jump to see an example of Google’s new and improved geocoder (with the same 3-year-old imagery, sadly).

As a reminder, here’s where Google dropped its pin back in January for the house highlighted in red:

And here’s how Google did today. The pin is directly over the driveway of the correct house:

And the Virtual Earth result, also spot-on:

Careful readers will know that I moan pretty much constantly about the age of Google’s coverage of my little corner of the world, to say nothing of the quality of their geocoder. Not only does it frustrate me personally because, among other things, my neighborhood is just a vast expanse of sand in Google Maps, it also is professionally frustrating over at Backyard Post.

Here, for example, is a neighborhood in which the developer started closing on condo units in November 2006. It, too, is just a bunch of sandy nothingness in Google Maps. Same deal here, here, here, here, here and so on. Thanks to the new imagery date feature in Google Earth, I can finally attach a date to my moan: Jan. 20, 2005. That’s when coastal Palm Beach County was shot. April 2006 for Martin County, and April 18, 2004 for much of St. Lucie County.

I fully intend to continue moaning about it, but at least now I’ll be better informed.