Here’s one for those lazy Sunday mornings: someone has made a Google Maps flight simulator mashup, complete with a 3D biplane. It’s a simple little game where you fly your plane above the landscapes of New York, London, Paris, Washington DC, and Tokyo. Just make sure not to fly too low, or you’ll go up in a fireball.

While the majority of people would probably find this first mashup to be completely frivolous, I find it to be hilarious. Most CAPTCHA systems are very straight-forward and boring. In fact, BuzzShout has one of the most standard CAPTCHA forms you’ll see. Hotcaptcha incorporates Hot or Not to require the user to choose the hot women or men out of a series of nine pictures to figure out whether you are human or bot. What is most funny is that if you choose even one that isn’t hot (yes, you will know which ones they are) then you are instantly seen as a bot. Hotcaptcha has code available so anyone can add this CAPTCHA to their website to ensure only humans are visiting.

Another cool mashup, which was decided to be the best at MashupCamp, is WeatherBonk. This mashup puts weather information over the very popular Google maps. Some of the maps available are live weather updates, a fog overlay, weather along a specific travel route, and seasonal weather. They also provide code for you to add a miniature weather map for your own site. While the map with live weather updates works well and is very cool, the fog overlay didn’t seem to work at all. Also, if you are a golf fan as I am, check out GolfBonk which uses Google maps to show you the course with current and upcoming weather, as well as let you write notes about specific holes.

Source for this entry was Chris Law’s blog 1000 Flowers Bloom