they are still useful as points of reference for navigation and seeing them on a map can be a great way to encourage making a little time for a detour via the interesting ones and very useful re the utilitarian ones.

restaurants, newsagents, chemists, shoe repairers, etc would be be useful, but only as an optional overlays, otherwise maps would get too crowded.

thanks for asking walkit, and keep up the good work!

The problem with using locations like restaurants and newsagents as landmarks is that they may close down, change name etc. The walkit.com route from Birmingham New Street station to Millennium Point (where I work) includes Los Canarios restaurant as a landmark, yet this closed down nearly a year ago and is in a block scheduled for demolition. It would be difficult for walkit.com to keep up with these kind of changes if commercial premises were used as landmarks more widely.

The Googlemaps and OS extracts shown in the BBC News online report do illustrate the disadvantages of much internet mapping. I still tend to use A-Zs or tourist board produced maps for navigating in cities as specially-designed maps will highlight the information of interest and also which are the more major routes.

User-generated content (such as the Wikipedia overlays in Googlemaps) is one way around this issue, but it suffers from a lack of editorial selection meaning that the user is presented with too large an array of information. I predict that over time solutions will emerge to decluttering such overlaid data or enabling selection according to interest.