If you're visiting an unfamiliar city or planning a long road trip, finding good playgrounds to keep the kids exercised and entertained can be a challenge. Playground Finder fills the gap with a user-contributed listing of playgrounds throughout Australia, sorted by state and with facilities lists and user reviews. It'd be nice to see some Google Maps integration for easier playground location (currently there are Whereis links), but this still could be a lifesaver when it's time to stretch the family's legs. (Thanks Simon!)  [Playground Finder]

MapMe.com puts a friendly spin on adding information to Google Maps, making it possible to develop and rate maps relating to your favourite topic or your local area without needing a healthy dose of coding knowledge. Maps can easily be assigned memorable names (like the self-explanatory www.mapme.com/map/violent-pubs-nsw, shown above), while future plans include Facebook integration. The project (developed in true Web 2.0 fashion between Australia, the UK, the Philippines and Antarctica) is currently in beta, but seems to be running in fairly stable condition. Give it a spin (registration required to build your own maps).

MapMe.com

US Only: Crime-mapping mashup SpotCrime pulls data from city police records and news sources and plots it in an easy-to-snoop fashion. Choose a city, a time frame, and the types of offences you want to see, and you can mouse over the pinned icons to see thumbnail descriptions, or click an item for a full read. The site claims that humans are working in the background to make sense of the data, and that incidents show up anywhere from 3-24 hours after they're reported. A good tool for checking out a potential neighbourhood for moving or exploring, or just keeping up on what's going down across town.

US-Centric (for now!): Google Maps now makes it easy to check out real estate listings in a certain area: click on the "Show search options" link next to the Search Maps button, and choose "Real Estate" from the drop down. Your search will map homes for sale, with photos and prices. Search blog Google Operating System reports that the results come from real estate site feeds, not Google Base. You can also refine your search by price, number of bathrooms and bedrooms. Looks like Google Maps is giving Zillow a run for its money, though Zillow offers home valuations for property that's not necessarily for sale.

Windows only: Microsoft Research releases astronomy application WorldWide Telescope, software which offers "terabytes" of detailed telescope images of the night sky for exploration right on your desktop. Zoom, pan, and explore the solar system, galaxies and more using WorldWide Telescope. The BBC reports:

Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. ... "Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," explained Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

Check out WorldWide Telescope in action after the jump.

Via Gizmodo, here's a demo of WorldWide Telescope at the TED conference back in February.

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Free travel guide site Schmap has crafted a pretty nifty interface for iPhone and iPod touch users looking for spots to hit while travelling. Navigate to the city you're travelling through, pick a category like restaurants or banks, and scroll through the vertical list of results. Flip your iPhone/touch sideways, and points from the section of the list you were scrolling through are mapped out, and contact and directions info are provided when tapped. Pretty handy for finding notable spots nearby without having to cross over applications. Point your iPhone or iPod touch to the link below to access the web app (but regular browsers can head there as well).

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Now that you know how to stitch together panoramic photos with free software, publish your creations at Panoye, a panoramic sharing web site. Panoye users are building "a virtual tour all around Earth" with user-submitted panoramic images. Upload, tag, geotag, and share your panoramas on Panoye, which offers YouTube-like HTML markup to embed a pannable panoramic image onto your own web site, like the one after the jump:

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Sure we've all downloaded a free copy of Google Earth, the big G's eye-popping desktop map application, and flown around the planet with a heightened sense of awe at how cool the whole thing is. But have you done anything else with Google Earth since then? Traveler Anick Jesdanun used Google Earth to create a robust photo tour of a trip through Antarctica and South America, and found the software powerful but complicated and difficult to intuit—especially for friends with whom he shared the resulting KML file.

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Before you head out on the town tonight in New York City, find out where to get your thirsty hands on your favourite hard-to-find beer at BeerMenus.com. This menu search site just launched with over 150 beer menus, which read more »

Travel website Expedia has launched a Hotels and Attractions Mapplet for Google Maps which lets you search for accommodation and tourist attractions in the area you're visiting.

When you look up a location in Google Maps, click on My Maps and you'll see Expedia Hotels and Attractions - click on that and it brings up a search box (see image, left).

Red pins denote a hotel (and there's a 'book now' button which will take you straight to the Expedia site), while blue pins denote a tourist attraction. The hotel listings include independent traveler reviews from TripAdvisor.

Map your way to your next trip [Official Google Australia Blog]