Slashdot Mirror
Maps on Path to Mass Innovation
Ryan MacCarthy writes "When Google and Yahoo! released their map APIs last week they unleashed a horde of hungry developers eager to integrate their data with the user-friendly maps. Brilliant hacks like Chicago Crime and Craigslist Real Estate are in the midst of switching over to the new API, while sites like MetroFreeFi use the new API to make it easier to find free wi-fi locations in US cities (San Francisco, for example). Imaginative developers, like Alan Taylor (Transparency concept), are digging deep into experimentation to dream up new uses for the maps. It's great to see the innovation when hacks turn to apps." I want to see Los Angeles maps of the action in James Ellroy's novels, and a national map of the worst, funniest tourist traps across the U.S.
Google hoods... find up to date information of the street gangs in your neighborhood.
is a map depicting the travel itinerary described by this book
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Comment removed based on user account deletion
People are making use of Google's new free API to show the location of stuff on a map.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Wow, I am impressed. The Craig's list and crime stats are really nicely done.
Speaking of Craig's List, this could be a disease spreader too. Think of being able to find that horny date close to you from the online personals. Little tags all over saying "Yea! I'm horny! come on over!". lol.
News headlines, "STD's spread like wildfire with Google's new map API".
..anybody have an easy way to switch over customized .xml/.xsl files from the mygmaps "GMaps Standalone" project to the new API?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I guess when you search for a location, Google will now show you a map of it? How is this different from Mapquest - other than offering an API?
Forget 2D maps. It's dead easy to play around with Google Earth - and you don't even need an API.
.kmz file. Then rename it to .zip and unzip it. You'll find a "doc.kml" file, xml-formatted, easy as pie to reverse-engineer and work with.
Go 'head and try it. Save a location, or folder of locations, as a
I want to see. . . a national map of the worst, funniest tourist traps across the U.S.
This will satisfy all your "worst, funniest tourist trap" needs.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
But I use Mapquest, you insensitive clod!
Come on, a username of 'iclod', a post to slashdot about a game called 'iCLOD'...it had to be done!
...why can't they figure out how to make it so you can get directions to a business by typing in the business name and having the mapping tool cross reference the yellow pages? Why should the user need to know the address?
I'd like to see a map that can reflect where the cheapest bite to eat is in the area...us college students have to live somehow...
:
--
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Google Earth is even cooler than Google Maps. Why can't they release APIs for Google Earth? Imagine integrating Google Earth into a flight simulator. That's what I'd like to see.
Been there, done that.
I want to see a map which lets me specify and measure out a route, for planning runs, bike rides, and other such sports. The goal isn't always to get from A to B!
Ideally, the interface should allow me to highlight a route over existing roads, with fudging for off-road stretches. Locations of water fountains, food stores or restaurants, and bathrooms would be a major plus too. Does such a thing exist yet?
FOAD, spammer.
So I thought I would look it up with Google Maps, and sure enough, I found it!
Thus rendering my need for the store irrelevant.
This last weekend I was trying to use the Cornwall tourist board website to look for a campsite. The problem with it (apart from the search not working in Firefox), was that you couldn't see exactly where in Cornwall each campsite is.
So, I have extracted the data of each site from the Cornwall tourist board website and have used it along with the Google maps API to create: Campsites in Cornwall
By the way, Cornwall is in the south-west of England.
Wiki + Maps = Location-Based Wiki
Somebody must be doing this already... links?
Becouse it is a troll, that post should be used as the example of troll posts in Wikkiopedia.
Oh and the facts are wrong too.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
i want a map of every gold mine in the world.
it should also overlay with oil fields, poulation density, fresh water supply, and power lines.
muwahahaa.
How about maps of the addresses of patent holders? Like cancer clusters...
--
make install -not war
Komi
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
I want to see Los Angeles maps of the action in James Ellroy's novels, and a national map of the worst, funniest tourist traps across the U.S.
It's not in LA, but Pedro's South of the Border (in South Carolina) would have to be on the list.
So you are saying that in some book is something called a "bound"? Or where you saying that the're bund in a book? I don't understand.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You specifically mentioned DNR. My understanding is that DNR shows state-owned property only, so that wouldn't help you with privately-owned stuff (and someone correct me if I'm wrong).
http://newyork.metrofreefi.com/city/New%20York/
:/
The Google Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site. You can generate a new key for this web site at http://www.google.com/apis/maps/
I guess that some people are still having problems with the way the access is provided.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Volusia County, Florida has a basic version of this and has for some time.
http://webserver.vcgov.org/Address.html
Starting from the address page, enter a valid address like "544 s floyd cir deltona". This will give you everything on the property, including a rough sketch of the floor plan. Scroll all the way down to "PALMS Mapping" and you can work thru an interactive map of the city getting data on various parcels.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You should have not posted that iClod link. If you would have read their site agreement, you would have noticed the Do-Not-Slashdot ACT. Below is a quote for the punishment:
"Those who did not act swiftly or simply ignored the effectiveness of The Do-Not-Slashdot ACT had suffered the consequences of burnt-down server rooms and employment termination, just to name a few."
I should probably mention that the following sites are bad ideas because they make the ACT void (if anyone actually used them): Corel or Mirrordot.
"That's what I'd like to see."
Funny how no one wants to see the bandwith bill, however.
Also, I include nearby sites and photos to enable geographic browsing, as a complement to direct links (contextual browsing) and technorati tags (semantic browsing).
Neat!
I'm guessing some of the big title company chains are starting to do this sort of thing, for internal use, but will keep it as a trade secret in the near term.
Let's focus a bit on the potential evil uses. Spam that knows where you live?
... is if someone stitched all the images together to make a bigger one. I've got a 21k image at work made by the NASA, but I'd like to get my hands on something bigger. That would be a great stress test on our app.
Bah, just wait until someone comes up with the patents for "Put [whatever] on an interactive map, using [source of addresses] as input!" and all other such obvious and trivial extensions of this nifty tool :(
/that/ is the only innovative or even remotely interesting part of this application would be too much to expect the Patent Office to understand...
Because, obviously, the fact that you can feed addresses into this thing with other data tags and that
Why, I bet you could sort things by price, distance, type of business, relationship with user, or positively anything you can give some kind of label or score (meaningful or not), change the color of the pins to correlate with the meta-data just mentioned, and feed in addresses from absolutely anything capable of listing addresses (mailing list, address book, harvester programs, internet searches, RSS feeds, user input, wiki-like, blog-like, usenet-like or any other collaborative online services, moderated or authoritative lists which may or may not accept user input, the phone book, etc.) to generate these maps.
Hmm, I wonder if posting this idea counts as publishing it (and thus, as prior art?). I can only hope so, because I hate to see all the patent-encumberances we have already, and I don't want intend to patent any part of this.
smells like a DUP?
What is this DUP you speak of? Is it some kind of hallucinogenic drug?
Google Serial Killers. Plot out the best spots to wack victim. Overlay with GPS from cell-phones. Season well with taunts sent via anonamizing technology. Serve with hot media coverage.
And it's a shame...
I used to work on production for Where Magazine in New Orleans. They would publish a map entitled "Where To Go In New Orleans" and I always wondered why they never published a map that showed areas where crimed occurred. At the time, New Orleans was pretty high on the murder-per-capita rates. But there were places that a tourist SHOULD KNOW ABOUT if they wanted to remain with their belongings and alive.
The magazine said they'd get sued out of existence.
Admittedly, publishing this kind of information in a magazine does push it under the umbrella of "opinion" unlike the Chicago Crime Maps, but it's a very thin hair to split. Chicago Crime Maps is merely publishing already available public data, but Where Magazine would have done that, too. What's to become of the tourist site that links to the maps?
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
So now the firefox plugin tracking how many times Heny Earl has been arrested for public drunkenness can now be upgraded to a map showing all the locations? Sweet.
how quickly these APIs are being implemented in clever new ways.
The upshot of this is that if you want to put location balloons on a satellite image, you may need to do some ad hoc adjustments to the latitude and longitude ... which I would guess you'll have to keep changing as google gradually improves the satellite presentation.
I've started a thread on the topic on the google map api discussion group, and at least one other person has noticed the same problem.
... Google maps of fictional places? I can see all kinds of tie-ins to (e)book publishing -- imagine if the Marauder's Map in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets could be accessed by the reader at any point in the story, of the potential of interactive maps of Narnia or (Alice in) Wonderland in drawing the reader into the story a bit more, blurring the boundaries between reading and gaming.
Seems like all it would take is for Google to accept the publisher's business, and post the maps.
The availability of high quality and freely available map data and maps over the internet along with open source software (and some creative minds) has finally been the catalyst to unleash a true revolution in the use of digital spatial data. As the recent O'Reilly book "Mapping Hacks" (http://mappinghacks.com/ documents and the Where 2.0 conference (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where/) demonstrated, you don't need expensive GIS software licenses or exclusive geospatial technical training to make effective use of online mapping.
Noticed how many academic or professional "geographers", "cartographers" or "certified spatial analysts" are involved in any of these projects? Nada. Oh, a few see the light but leave it to the true hackers to truly push the boundaries (no pun intended) of the art.
As a recent ZDNET review of the Where 2.0 conference stated, "Hackers are teaching the industry what to do."
I created a page that lets you customize a map for inclusion on your website. The site is at http://shiwej.com/sitemapper/. You enter in a few options, and get code that you can put right on your site. And it's easy to create the Google Maps API key that is required for the map to work on your site.
JasonBlogs
Total messages in their respective developer forums as of right now:
Google Maps API: 1445
Yahoo Maps API: 53
Ouch. I smell wet/burnt dog hair.
Some how two words come into mind: "Wall Drug"
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
There's really nothing innovative here -- just more code... Nothing that couldn't be done before -- now we can just waste more time faster...
Ka-Map is an interface api based on Mapserver which allows you to create and navigate tiled maps ala Google Maps. Check out a demo site here
It is a fairly young project, just waiting for a few more talented programmers to help push it along. I would love to see a open source alternative to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps providing base maps to these services.
That's not entirely true.
Geographers and GIS professionals create the data behind all these applications (and what's an online map without data?)
It takes a lot of work and innovation, both in government and the private sector, to create spatial data in a form useable by everyone.
So here is a question.. The API TOS says "We also want to respect people's privacy, so the API should not be used to identify private information about private individuals." So if your state publishes sex offenders addresses online are you able to publish that information using google maps?
"GTA: World" anyone?
This is the overhead of the niagara falls hydropower resevoir. The power station is lo res, but the neighborhood isn't.
This is the site of a Dupont factory, a Dunlop Tire factory and a General Motors plant. All low res.
This view shows a CSX rail depot in the north east and the Buffalo River (which has a plant for making HCl among other things iirc) in the south west. Both blurred.
Now, I have no problem with denying high resolution images of sensitive areas to the civilian population (especially since the areas I've shown you are all prominently featured in the bad dreams of local emergency services types). But if that's the criterion for deciding what's obscured and what isn't, the result is slapdash. This photo shows a cheese factory. Those white tanks are NH3 tanks for the refrigeration system. Since the winds here are usually from the south west or west, the cloud resulting from a leak in the ammonia system would blow right over one of the more densly populated neighborhoods in Buffalo. Clearly, this should have been obscured as well (Except you can see pretty much the whole thing from the street, which isn't true of the other examples).
It would seem that someone already read your mind SparafucileMan.What I want to know is who; Google, the local government, the national government (DHS or whoever), the owners of stuff being obscured?
Discuss.
I'd like to see the next dimension that Google Maps add be time. It would be cool if it were possible to have all of the satellite imagery from the last 40 years or so going right up to today with a fleet of googlesats providing near real-time imagery and then scroll through it all. Man, this makes me wish I were smart enough to work at Google.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I've been messing around in Google Earth for a while now, mainly finding my mates houses/places of interest around the Melbourne (Australia) CBD. What I think would be handy would be a street directory overlay. At the moment i've been alt tabbing between google earth and whereis.com.au .. has anyone started on such a project (in the US i'm assuming) as this would be interesting to check out.
Umm.. I thought there was an article or story here.
It just looks like an excuse to post about google with no new information, and links to sites we all have already seen.
Did I miss something?
Do you remember that first time you watched an Indiana Jones movie and thought how cool it'd be to have your very own 'little red line' cataloging your travels? Ever wonder 'just how close' or 'really far off' you were to your friends on the playa one night when you said to meet up with friends and it never worked out? Misguided in your travels to find 'something' that you thought you knew where was? Well thanks to a GPS unit, some conversion software and the google maps API I've finally started making my own Indiana Jones red-line (http://www.oastler.ca/maps/dynamic.html) The next step would be put another 'layer' on top to allow your friends to all upload their tracks of where they are and - for those privacy minded folks out there - have it broadcast the waypoints / track by wifi to the server and you can play Where's Waldo - errr Where's Jamie - whenever you want. The tie-in to infoWindows to pictures I take is already 1/2 way done too, just not sure how to get Picasa XML extract and this to tie together or if I even need Picasa to do that.
Already been done in King County, Washington.
. htm
King County Parcel Viewer:
http://www.metrokc.gov/gis/mapportal/PViewer_main
And a similiar (and brand new) site for local jursidictions:
http://www.nwmaps.net/
Real Estate:
http://www.nwproperty.net/
It would be cool if there was a plugin for X-Plane flight sim so that it automatically downloads maps as you fly over a location. :-)
Anyone doing it? If so links please, if not, I could give a hand
AC for obvious reasons, since I'd rather you people not know where I live.
Sure they are neat, but hardly amazing.
Specifically, the transparency concept isn't innovative or extraordinarily imaginitive. Websites like MultiMap have had transparency overlay availble on UK street maps for years now. As I'm sure many other map sites have. Infact you'd think Google Maps would have this feature has standard, and they probably will some time soon.
As for Google themselves, the only thing setting them apart from the crowd here (This must be the innovotive bit) is their willingness to release a well documented and featured open API. I think the submitter missed the difference between "mass innovation" and "marketing for the masses" or some smart business modelling. Up until recently they had no way control (or nurture) the mashup frenzy... and now they do.
Heres an interesting entry on the O'Reilly Radar Blog - How To Roll Out An Open API.
Hopefully other services and companies will be more keen on releasing API's in the future.
It could be like 'jive' for Google Maps.
Yes, Google and Yahoo have opened up offical APIs, with terms of service people can use, rather than the existing hacks of their services.
I personally would have mod'd that "Funny," but I guess no one asked me.
What is a Do Not Resuscitate plot map?
antipaucity
I've been trying to use Google Earth to produce a decent "fly through" of the areas and settings in my next novel, Perfect Killer but the interface is a total kludge.
... but it's more of a navigation dog than the first DOS version of Flight Simulator.
I shelled out $600 for the Pro version of Google Earth and the MovieMaker functions
The hack that's really needed is a driver to interface something like the CH Products Flight Sim yoke to the directional and altitude controls in Google Earth so that smooth changes could be made.
Given that my programming experience is mostly Fortran and Perl, writing drivers is out of the question.
Is anyone working on a hack like this?
Although Wisconsin's Open Records law is quite clear about the open nature of electronic records, the law also lets county offices recoup the cost of providing real estate information like this. It's called "cost recovery".
Therefore you see county offices charging stiff amounts to title companies for real-time access to property records, for example. To do this, you'd need to pay the fees to get a copy of each county's databases, then find a way to integrate all that info. Maybe most of them use ArcInfo.
I suspect you'll see the most populous counties (Dane, Milwaukee, Waukesha, etc.) move towards more open public access to their databases first, but there's always a balancing concern that the info will be harvested for junk mail purposes.
And I thought the printed plat books were about $10-15.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
An on-point discussion of the Open Records law regarding land info records can be found at http://www.wlia.org/standards/PrivacyOpenRecordsHa ndbook.htm .
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
I don't see anything special about this GIS. Hillsborough Florida has a GIS system just like this, with the exception that it is cleaner, faster, and more functional.
http://propmap3.hcpafl.org/
I've come up with a method to display Geocaches with Google Maps using an AJAX model...check out how: http://www.cplee.org/archives/000092.html Casey
But this was last week's news. There are no articles from this post.