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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.
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".
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.