Anybody want to add support for 'points of interest' ?

[amario]

If you're interested in hacking on the SF bike planner, here's a good
feature to take on-- it's relatively self-contained and requires some
investigation, but seems pretty doable to me.

http://code.google.com/p/sf-bike-planner/issues/detail?id=26

Allow users to specify points of interest (e.g. "Golden Gate Bridge")
for start/end location

Q: How would we do this?

I'm thinking use Google Local Search API to somehow extract address
for point of interest (if it exists 'near san francisco') and then
reverse geocode that to get lat/lng. I searched around to see if
there's a way to directly geocode points of interest, but couldn't
find anything. See for example:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3/browse_thread/thread/e799e4ad916a8e90

Let me know if you wanna take a stab at this-- I can set you up with
ftp access to amarpai.com/trunk and commit access for the trunk branch
in svn.

cheers

Amar