The end of foreign-content restrictions may mean your clients will develop an interest in far-away places and their investment potential.

You can be proactive by bookmarking Web sites of atlases that will quickly let you do everything from finding a country or city to checking out its economy, politics and history. As a bonus, these are fantastic sites if you or your clients plan to travel.

Here are three terrific atlas sites:


MultiMap

www.multimap.com

The Internet is home to thousands of Web sites that claim to offer excellent global atlases, but the vast majority are terrible.
MultiMap stands high atop almost all its rivals. Launched in 1996, the London-based site gets 140 million page views a month, an impressive number that is more than doubling each year.

Its popularity is understandable, as it’s much more than a collection of maps.
Visitors can do everything from look at a continent or a country to zoom down to a city and even look at a specific intersection.

The site will tell you current weather conditions and allow you to book a hotel within blocks of your refined search. I started one search with an entire map of Canada and the northern U.S., and found my own neighbourhood with eight simple “zoom ins,” which took about 30 seconds.

If you are in a hurry, just type the city and street in the search box in the upper left-hand corner of the home page. Or you can type in the postal code and find the exact area of the street — an incredible benefit if you’re unsure where a business meeting will take place, or if you plan to travel and want to see exactly where you’ll be staying.
Some streets, after all, go on for kilometres.

Areas that don’t come with the street-search feature offer road maps. If you can’t find a specific street in Istanbul, Cairo or Bombay, you can quickly get a local map and a list of rated hotels and restaurants in the centre of the city.



GeographyIQ

www.geographyiq.com

MultiMap lets you zoom down from on high to within a few blocks of much of the Western world, but GeographyIQ gives you in-depth knowledge about any specific area on the globe. The site downplays maps and roads, and instead emphasizes the nuts-and-bolts statistics of any area you investigate. It offers a concise recap of each country’s history, economy, demographics, currency conversion, politics, climate and time zone. If a client asks for information about India, Nigeria or Uzbekistan, for example, you can quickly reply with a veritable feast of data on those countries.

This Web site is simple to use. Click on the globe in the centre of the home page to find a continent or country, or use the alphabetical index of nations in the upper left-hand corner. If you need facts on Brazil, for instance, a few clicks will tell you it is a republic with 184 million people, has the fifth-largest population in the world and is 8.5 million square kilometers in size.

The site even ranks countries in various categories, so you can tell a client that Brazil has the world’s fifth-largest labour force and is the seventh-largest user of televisions, radios and cellphones.

You can also click on any ranking and find how a country stacks up against its 200 or so competitors on a global level. Hong Kong, for example, is the world’s tenth-largest exporter, vs 17th-ranked Canada, even though it is ranked 177th in geographical size — vs Canada’s second-place spot — and has a population of less than seven million. The GeographyIQ site should prove invaluable in coming years, and provide tons of facts for newsletters, speeches or your own Web site.


WorldAtlas

www.worldatlas.com

The third leg of our world tour is Texas-based WorldAtlas, which should fill any gaps left from the other sites and provide excellent tips for travellers. In addition to an impressive array of maps, including a vast archive of printable city maps from around the world, the site has many handy features, such as the ability to find a country or a body of water quickly if you’re not sure where it is. If anyone ever asks you to find Moldova or Palau, or the Logone or Oti rivers, you now have a site with instant answers.

@page_break@Another useful resource is a calculator that will give you the distance between most larger cities in the world. If you or a client plan to travel from Vancouver to Moscow, for example, you’ll have 8,229 kilometers ahead of you, as the crow flies.

Another benefit is the availability of printable “outline maps,” which provide the border outlines of each continent, country and its internal regions, and are totally blank everywhere else. These are excellent for visual presentations, and can be used on your Web site, in letters to clients or for personal travel use. Just fill one in, and draw attention to anything in the country you want to emphasize. IE

If you have sites to share with IE readers, please send an e-mail to gflanagan@sympatico.ca.