Look at one bustling block in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen: Someone is hawking a 1,200 square foot loft. A kosher restaurant dishes out bagels. Several tractor trailers and a taxi pull through an intersection. A convicted pedophile lurks down the street.

Thanks to weekend Webheads, you can find all this and more in most major cities without lacing up your sneakers. Their creations -- known as mash-ups -- use virtual pushpins on fast-loading city maps to plot everything from real estate and restaurants to local crime and sex offenders.

And like many other technology trends that start off in the hands of hobbyists (think blogs), this could turn into something big. Already, many of the creators of the sites are earning pocket change by running ads on their sites.

Soon enough, it could be money in the pockets of big corporations.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all allowed programmers broad access to their mapping technology -- and it's becoming clear that whoever captures the hearts of developers now stands to capture valuable Web real estate that could mean profits later. Google, for example, reserves the right to someday place ads on maps generated with its software.

"It really helps us position our mapping tool as an innovative product being leveraged in lots of interesting ways and it really helps our brand," said Brett Taylor, product manager of Google Local.

At first, hackers interested in mixing their own personal Web cocktails had to steal from the liquor cabinets of big Internet companies, deconstructing a site's html script to figure out how to code desirable bits into their own sites. But now companies are increasingly supplying the booze for this party, offering instructions on how to use the technology. (For five things you can do with mash-ups, click here: http://asap.ap.org/stories/145991.s )

Within weeks of Google launching its mapping feature in April, Web developers had figured out how to code their own Web pages to include a map in their sites. Among those sites was http://www.housingmaps.com , which plots Craigslist real estate listings on a Google map and http://www.chicagocrime.org , which lets users plot police crime data over maps of that city.

"We all laughed about how it beat all of our expectations," Taylor recalls.

At the end of June, the company released a toolkit showing how the mapping software works, allowing developers to register and receive updates. While Google had always intended to release programming tools to help developers use the maps, the appearance of sites that figured it out on their own sped up the process, Taylor said.

Since then, the competition has gotten heated. Microsoft and Yahoo released similar guides to their mapping features and other Internet-based software, and all three have since upgraded their services. Just this month, Google and Yahoo each released new mapping features, while Microsoft announced a broad enhancement to its Internet services that includes souped-up maps.

"If you're one of those players you can't afford to be left behind. It would be foolish for any of them to wait to figure out what the economic model would be," said John Musser, 44, creator of http://www.programmableweb.com , which tracks interesting ways people are combining different sites.

But the leader so far has been Google, which developers say offers the most stylish and easy-to-use mapping software. While Google won't say how many people have signed up to use its developer tools, Taylor says there are easily "thousands." Mike Pegg, whose http://www.gmapsmania.com tracks mash-ups involving Google maps, says he knows of at least 700.

Taylor said Google had no specific plans for advertising on sites that use their maps -- and would probably share revenue with the mash-up creator if they did. But the proliferation of the free, easy to use mapping software has some wondering what's the catch. Chicagocrime.org's founder Adrian Holovaty said he's already created a version of his Web site that can run on Microsoft's mapping service if Google ads ever appear on his site.

"It's in a way a bait and switch because it's making this cool free functionality available to anyone who wants it so its sort of hooking people in," Holovaty said. "It's inevitable that Google will start putting advertising on these maps. So they have hundreds of maps on hundreds of decentralized web sites and all of the sudden they're going to have advertising. And I think we'll start to see a backlash when that happens."

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Jonathan Drew is an asap reporter.

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