One of the cool demos I saw last week at the Kelsey Conference in Seattle was from Microsoft's Live Maps team. The team has done serious work in trying to close the gap with Mapquest, Yahoo and Google with its new mapping service.

(Side note: Doing a bit of research for this post, I was quite surprised to learn that Mapquest commands more than 50% of the market share for online maps (while Microsoft has less than four percent). Personally, I thought Mapquest went the way of Alta Vista and Netscape. I haven't used it in years.

The demo I saw last week featured lots of little extra features on the Live Maps service (although I still don't get the whole "Live" branding). My favorite was a layer of traffic flow data that can be applied to any map which gives the user a key piece of information. So the search I ran for "barbecue" in "Tacoma" (see above screenshot) not only produced 21 locations, but could also be drawn with traffic flow information that would help me figure out how long it would take to get to one of the locations. A user simply needs to click "Traffic" from the tools menu (see inset).

Mashing up data from different sources is not new on the web. But I expect to see more efforts like this that do it in a scalable and useful manner. What's your favorite data/map mashup?