The San Fransisco Chronicle has a news article on the “Internet’s hottest phenomena,” the map mashup. As well as describing some of the wonderful combinations of map and adata, it also highlights the issue that most of the map mashup creators do not own the data they use. “Some mash-ups operate in a gray area of what’s permissible. Their operators crawl data from other Web sites that have no published policies about the practice, hoping nobody will notice.” Understandably, this can cause some problems. Still, expect the use of mashups to increase as the larger Internet companies get into the practice of combining data with maps.