Scattered » Blog Archive

Home / blog / Google Maps

Google Maps Transparencies At least look at this one.

Weather on a Google map, with clever use of custom icons to indicate wind speed and direction.
How to geotag photos.
How to make KML files for Google Earth. Don’t miss Google’s KML tutorial and KML reference.
Map of free Wifi in NYC. It’s worth noting that Google Local does this too, but without a master directory.
gmapPedometer. Double-click on the map to mark waypoints, and the app tells you the total distance defined by the waypoints. You must click at every intersection, otherwise it assumes you can walk through buildings, because Google hasn’t exposed a routing API.
Google Maps Transparencies lets you view a street map in the context of the satellite photo of the area. It’s interesting how the map doesn’t line up with the photo. It’s unclear how much of this is a datum problem (c.f. the Google Earth demo at Where 2.0 where someone in the audience pointed out that the overlaid road didn’t line up with the actual road) and how much is the natural fuzziness of the Ajax UI being imprecise about clicks and locations.
Yahoo! News over a Yahoo! map. Either the app or the Yahoo! maps API seemed easily confused by clicking and dragging: it was soon displaying the wrong map for the points (or vice-versa).
Google Earth Hacks is a blog devoted to cool stuff done with Google Earth. Notable examples: London Attacks and Tour de France locations. The site seems more about being a downloads.com for KML files that about actually hacking stuff with Google Earth.
Been Mapped is adding community to the Google satellite imagery sightseeing craze. You can build your own playlist, vote and rank locations, etc.
Find US webcams by zipcode. This is slow and doesn’t appear to contain nekkid web cams, so I don’t predict it will take the net by storm.
Latest 2.5+ earthquakes. Uses mygmaps as the platform. Mmm, Pacific Rim of Fire goodness!
IncidentLog.com plots publicly-available incident data (only available for selected cities, as it relies on the local cities/counties putting the information online and most don’t).
Vancouver tourist map. Very cool!
Add geocoding to the Google Javascript API. It uses geocoder.us instead of scraping the geocoder built into the Google Maps website.
And finally, Google Maps Mania is a blog tracking the maps hackers. Most of the links I’ve just given have appeared on there.