Donavon West, whose company LiveGadgets.net was hired by Microsoft to develop the Live Search Maps Gadget originally, has announced via LiveSide that the Live Search Maps gadget is back and available for download! This awesome gadget lets you look at traffic in many different cities. I use this gadget all the time especially when traveling up to Seattle.

Donavon says work has been done “under-the-hood” so visually the gadget won’t look much different than before. He also says new cities have been added: Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Toronto. New cities will automatically show up in the Live Search Maps Gadget when they are added going forward.

This gadget is a must-have for folks who commute and do quite a bit of traveling.

Today the Virtual Earth Team announced they successfully published their biggest update to the Virtual Earth platform yet - running at 26 terabytes! That is quite a bit of data to publish to the web. This update brings expanded aerial imagery and textured 3D buildings/cityscapes to new cities (full list on the Virtual Earth Team’s blog).

It also brings a new feature to Virtual Earth which also powers Live Search Maps: “hill shades”. The hill shading feature allows the user viewing a road-style map to convey elevation on the maps.

The above screenshot is of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State on Live Search Maps. You can see the shading effects allow you to get an idea of elevation. Hill shading is the term the Virtual Earth Team is using but I’m not entirely sure if that is the official name for this feature.

I’ve relied heavily on Live Search Maps most of this year during my travels and also when I drive up to Redmond from Portland. I continue to use Live Search Maps for most of my mapping needs.