The main problem with the map solution right now seems to be that the information isn’t all in one place.  Instead of pushing the burden of keeping everything synced up onto the players, I wrote a quick script to do it for us.  You can see the results at http://blognomic.appspot.com/purplebeard-2/settlement .

On each request, this page is dynamically generated from the GNDT and the wiki.  On most browsers, hovering you mouse over the @ will bring up a tooltip that lists what the original map has at that location and which players are present there.  The official representation of the gamestate should remain the GNDT and the wiki, but players can use this to get a better idea of where everyone is.

If any of the admins have an appengine developer account, I’ll gladly let them have access to this domain.  Anyone can see the source code at http://github.com/haleret/blognomic .