Is there any place in the world that you know better than your own neighborhood or haunt? How would you like to aid Google in making their knowledge of the area smarter? That’s what’s happening right now as Google is inviting its own users to help them curate their vast maps of United States neighborhoods and tapping their own customer base to become citizen cartographers.

“Today we’re opening the map of the United States in Google Map Maker for you to add your expert local knowledge directly. You know your neighborhood or hometown best, and with Google Map Maker you can ensure the places you care about are richly represented on the map. For example, you can fix the name of your local pizza parlor, or add a description of your favorite book store,” Google recently blogged.

The Google Map Maker software underneath it all has existed for quite some time and Google has used it extensively in other countries—but this is the first time they’ve put much pressure on U.S. maps and citizens.

The software permits users to draw lines to promote boundaries, to show the locations of streets, place buildings, parking lots, add local data and expertise to what might otherwise be dull satellite and street maps. Not all of the data the Google receives is correct and it can fall out of date extremely quickly. By putting a few heads together, a community can greatly increase the accuracy of their data on Google Maps by correcting business names, changing who is in what building (i.e. that coffee shop that replaced a retail outlet only three months ago.)

This sort of software would benefit smartphone users especially by giving an extra expert level to local reality augmentation. We’ve already seen it starting to pour out of map makers like MapQuest attempting to push onto Google Android—even if Google Maps already has a strong showing there, especially with offline-downloadable data that can combine with GPS. I imagine check-ins and GPS would go together well with Map Maker and a smartphone so that a person could trace out a route, upload that information, and the refine it in Map Maker before submitting it. What better time to correct out-of-date data on a map then when you’re on-the-go, stop at a location, check your Google Map and discover that there’s a typo in a name or that a boundary is thirty feet off?

Google is pushing hard into the mapping augmentation and citizen curation avenues for community involvement—see museum photos and auto-checkin—and they have the userbase to effectively leverage this as well.

The details that boots-on-the-ground citizens could add to a place combined with proper review and release will probably make Google the go-to map provider when it comes to well-trod neighborhoods. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d also like to see citizen cartographer maps that aren’t curated by people other than Google. I imagine ARGs and fantasy-games running on their own communities of Google maps where regions are set aside by users, such is as already done by some interesting AJAX for Google Maps.

“Share My Google Map” becoming just as vogue as “Share my Google Calendar” anyone? I’d love to be able to see what my friends have added that isn’t for public consumption. After all, a community isn’t just made up of what’s globally or publicly visible, it’s also all the inside knowledge that makes up the connections and relationships, from notes scrawled in our atlases and on napkins.