iPod subway maps are hot—if your municipality’s mass transit authorities aren’t busy trying to stop them from being published and distributed. That’s what we gleaned from reading ipodsubwaymaps.com, one of those quirky Web-centric labors of love in which someone (in this case, William Bright, a design director for Nerve.com), aims to create a Web-based clearing-house for subway maps that can be downloaded to one’s iPod for easy navigation on the fly. Ironically, one of the cities currently making progress difficult is New York, where there’s a mere 250 miles of subway system to navigate and most people don’t have a car. Actually, despite what we said before, his quest for approval from the MTA proves that iPod subway maps are hot even where they are not available. A post explaining how the Authority has asked him to pony up $500 and agree to certain conditions before it will let him distribute the map has garnered 206 comments since last Thursday. One thing that strikes us as kinda weird: do New Yorkers secretly harbor a desire to be robbed? There’s been a rash of iPod thefts on the subway … and people really want to whip out their iPod to navigate it?

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor