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Mapping site, myTopo.com, gives users cool aerial view, personalized topos

Paige Darden is a nice woman with a soft southern accent. But to be honest with you – and her – I gave her the cold Montana shoulder at first.

Brett French -Billings Gazette

You see, Darden was push-ing her company’s latest prod-uct. A business built by a cou-ple of Red Lodge guys, http://www.myTopo.com, hired her as a publicist. When that company was bought, she also began promoting the new owners, MapCard. MapCard is based in Eagan, Minn., just south of the Twin Cities.

The cold shoulder

Newspaper writers often get people urging them to do stories on their products or business. Sometimes, if it is unique enough, we consent. But for the most part we’re bombarded, like all consumers, by unwanted promotional material and products we’re not interested in.

So even when something nifty comes along, we’re often a bit stand-offish. But to her credit, Darden persisted and left me with a small card that allowed me an online test drive of MapCard. I tossed it on my paper-obscured desk and ignored it for a few days.

When I had a chance, I opened up the site, logged on and started exploring. According to MapCard, its site is an advanced mapping sys-tem where you can customize, annotate, print and save unlim-ited maps. Through the site, subscribers have access to USGS topographic maps, aerial photography and road over-lays.

The site turned out to be a blast, not just for me, but for my fellow staffers, also. A few gathered around once I showed them an aerial photo I printed off. Pretty soon, we were plugging in coordinates to search out a friend’s old family farm in Iowa. Then we flew over Utah, Minnesota and Michigan.

As one friend put it, "I think you could play with the thing until you go blind."

It was that much fun.

How it differs

MapCard differs from its associated myTopo.com in that you print off your own topo-graphical maps or aerial pho-tos. At myTopo.com, you can order an 18-inch by 24-inch aerial photo or choose one of the various sizes of topographi-cal maps.

Some of the neat features of MapCard include:

# Users can customize a map or photo using symbols showing waypoints, or to mea-sure distance and acreage.

# Aerial photos and topo-graphic maps are available on different zoom levels – from 1:5,000,000 (way out) to 1:6,000 (zoomed in) on many maps and photos.

# There are three base layers to choose from; aerial photography, topographic maps and general land-use maps
# When your map is complete, you can print, save or download it.

# You can also e-mail your map or photo to a friend, or request that a high-resolution tiff image be e-mailed to you. The tiff can be used to view details not available online or to create a large format print.

# Click on the photo icon and users are bumped over to the myTopo.com site where they can order waterproof or glossy USGS topo maps in three sizes, starting at $9.95, or order the high resolution USGS aerial photos for $14.95. The date the photo was taken is printed on the photo.

MapCard is a subscriber service for one year. To purchase a subscription, log on to mapcard.com. Users can choose from one of four regions – West, South, Northeast or Midwest – or get coverage of the entire U.S. Each region is only $19.95, or purchase the whole U.S. for $34.95. For an extra $7.50, the membership will include about 1,000 lake-depth contour maps for the Midwest.

There is no charge to roam around myTopo.com until you purchase a map or photo.

By this summer, MapCard and myTopo.com should be more fully integrated, allowing customers to order a photo or map without being bumped around. The guys at myTopo.com are also working at integrating their maps more closely with Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) coordinates as well as beefing up their equipment to handle a larger database. That will eventually allow customers to order poster-size aerial photos.

According to Tom Kohley, of myTopo.com, the aerial photos have quickly become the company’s best-selling product.

So, with apologies to Darden, if you’re a map freak, hunter, hiker, backpacker, landowner or just like to look at the country from up high, check out MapCard and its relative, myTopo.com.

Brett French can be reached at [email protected] or at 657-1387.

Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.

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