When I was in middle school, some of the kids in my class started trying to dig a hole to China on our playground. What they didn’t know is that, had they succeeded, they would have ended up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The kids in Bolivia and Argentina, however, would have had much more luck.

How do I know this? On Map TallEye, digging a hole through the center of the Earth is just one of the Google Maps mash-ups provided. You can also see where walking in a straight line through the Earth will take you, and on a more local scale, show you where the best jogging routes are or the most convenient way to get to the supermarket from your house.

Google Maps mash-ups let you view the world more actively, and learn geography in a way far more interesting than simply memorizing countries and their capitals.

With Google maps mash-ups, you could make up a map where you input, say, chocolate, and the map guides you to the places in the world with the best chocolate. You could do the same kind of thing for shopping, watching sports, or going on hikes, which makes finding your favourite place in the world a little bit easier.

Another Google Maps mash-up I found is a map of the world that shows you what Wikipedia pages people are editing, pretty much while you’re watching.

I sat and watched WikiPedia Vision for a while tonight. It updates constantly, giving you the global locations of the latest anonymous updates, along with the title of the pages being updated.

Some of the entries I saw include "Hair" from Sydney, "Sinsestro" from Brooklyn, "Ali G" from Clifton, N.J., the European Parliamentary elections from Hungary, and the town of Babushkin from France.

Someone from Columbus, Ohio, had something to say about “Me first and the Gimme gimmes,” and in the 10 minutes I watched there was an update on "The Devil" from Canada, "Anti-Christian Discrimination" from Texas, and "Incest in Popular Culture" from Arkansas.

Interested in what’s going on locally but The News Gazette isn’t exactly what you’re looking for? Ongmap is an insane Google Maps mash-up that will help you discover endless amounts of information about a specific location you are zoomed into on the map.

Who needs a flat map? Map mash-ups are bringing information from across the Web alive. Maybe American kids, notorious for hardly being able to pinpoint anything on a map, will start loving them.