You wouldn't think Apple was a company that needed to worry about reinventing itself, but yes, apparently so. MediaPost's editor-at-large, Diane Mermigas, has this to say about how Apple "is morphing from a nimble electronic power into a formidable digital lifestyle company."

One of the things we talk about a lot here at Newspaper Next Central is how new technology allows information that has always existed to be collected, "mashed up," and disseminated in new and much more meaningful ways. The example we always use is the map.

Consider my colleague Steve Gray's point: Latitudes and longitudes for every location on Earth have existed for centuries. But only in the last 10 years have we seen people traveling to every tiny intersection in every small town to geocode it. Why now? Because, through new technology, all these codes can be amassed into a huge database and voilà! We can represent spatially anything we want, in a way we never could before.

Maps are all around us so we tend to take them for granted, and lots of newspapers are starting to capitalize on the power of maps to provide various kinds of information (see the list below). But a couple of recent events reminded me of how powerful different kinds of maps can be in a local community, and how easy it is for newspapers to create them.