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Engadget provides a interesting piece on hacking Google Maps. This is a part of web applications that I haven't seen a ton of blog posts on. AJAX type technologies provide nice urls to get little pieces of information. However, you've also basically have a web services type API for information retrieval. Since the browser renders things based off of this XML/HTML, things can be easily proxied and manipulated with a little reverse engineering even if a site's creators haven't explicitly published an API.

Hacking Google Maps
One of the great things about Google maps is it has its roots in XML. To translate for the non-web developers out there, it basically means Google maps are user hackable. This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you?ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map. We?ll walk you through the steps we took to generate an annotated map of a walk we took recently through our hometown, now that it?s actually starting to get warm enough to want to walk about!