News > Google Maps
Category: Google Maps | May 14, 2013
The travel guide publishers Rough Guide have used the Google Maps API to provide a guide to great place to visit worldwide.
As you navigate the Rough Guide website look out for the ‘view map’ option that allows you to view Rough Guide recommended locations on a map. The drop-down menu above the map allows you to select individual countries and cities.
If you select a country or city from the menu then a general introduction to your chosen destination is given beneath the map and all the Rough Guide recommended places to visit are displayed on the map.
Spiegel Online has also released a travel guide to the world. The Google Maps based guide is a mixture of Spiegel travel reports, travel writer’s travel tips and Spiegel readers’ travel tips.
Die Welt Entdecken (Explore the World) allows the user to search a Google Map by location and to filter the travel suggestions shown on the map. The filters include these different types of travel tips and advice and also categories, such as food & drink, where to sleep and places to visit.
Die Welt Entdecken is in German. 
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/-Bj3ZvKg8Zk/the-google-maps-guides-to-world.html
Category: Google Maps | May 13, 2013
Air Hogs are promoting their remote controlled aircraft with a little Street View game. Sky Stunt – Stunt Around the World is a game in which you have to control an Air Hog remote controlled plane as it flies around some interesting locations around the world.
Only the first mission involves Google Maps Street View. In this mission you can choose any location that has Street View and then make the aircraft perform a stunt when it reaches a defined spot on the Street View. If you pass the first mission you will progress to undertake ever more challenging missions.
Hat-tip: Google Street View World 
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/_-DclsBsQ8c/stunt-planes-on-street-view.html
Category: Google Maps | May 13, 2013
The Worldwide Website Speed Test allows you to test how fast a webpage loads from anywhere in the world.
To test a website you just need to enter its URL in the search box and click on the Google Map. The app then uses a huge network of proxies to test the loading speed and displays the results beneath the map. You can select multiple locations on the map and compare the speed of loading the website at different locations across the world.
From the same developer as the Worldwide Website Speed Test comes the Zip Code Catcher, a great Google Maps based application for finding and downloading all the zip codes for a specific area.
The map includes two drawing tools. A circle tool allows the user to
quickly define a radius around the desired location. However, if you
need to define an area more precisely, a polygon tool allows you to plot
out an area more accurately.
Once you have defined the desired area on the map you just need to click
the download button and you can download a CSV of all the zip codes in
your selected area. The downloaded spreadsheet includes all the zip
codes and the city, state, latitude and longitude, the population and
even the distance from the center of your selected area for each zip
code.
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/9jsKKxOc80M/testing-website-speeds-with-google-maps.html
Category: Google Maps | May 13, 2013
At about this time every microformats.dk creates a Google Map of all the songs featuring in the annual Eurovision Song Contest. This year microformats.dk has been saved the task of mapping the best in Euro-pop because he has found that DR dk has already created a map.
The map features embedded videos of all the countries’ entries into the competition. As ever the Eurovision Map includes some truly awful songs. My favourite is the Maltese entry. The ukulele doesn’t feature enough in pop songs these days! And the song contains what has to be the best line from this year’s entries,
“His name is Jeremy and he works in IT”.
All kidding aside – I actually quite like this one. 
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/C6Y36rMdTac/the-euro-pop-map.html
Category: Google Maps | May 13, 2013
The UK’s Bat Conservation Trust has created The Big Bat Map in order to crowdsource sightings of bats.
If you have seen a bat or bats you can add your sighting to the map by filling in a short form, giving the location, the number of bats and description of what the bat(s) were doing. If you want to see some bats you can use the map to find map hotspots. The Big Bat Map hotspots have been recommended by Bat Conservation Trust staff and local bat groups as good places to visit f you want to see bats in the wild.
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/WCcNqS-at5w/na-na-na-na-na-na-na-bat-map.html
Category: Google Maps | May 13, 2013
Like thousands of over people around the world I have been avidly following Cmdr Chris Hadfield’s Twitter account, during his mission aboard the International Space Station.
One of the features of Cmdr Hadfield’s tweets has been his amazing photos of Earth taken from the ISS. While viewing the photos I’ve often hoped that someone would undertake the task of mapping them – and of course someone has.
Our World from the ISS is an ESRI map of photos, taken from the ISS posted by @Cmdr_Hadfield and @AstroMarshburn on Twitter. If you click on the markers you can view a thumbnail of the posted image. If you click on the thumbnail the photo will open in a new browser window.
In truth I’m only posting this map today as an excuse to include what must be the greatest music video of all time. So just in case you are the one person left on Earth who hasn’t yet seen Cmdr Hadfield’s amazing version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity – here it is:
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/J5U4cBU_Rrw/photos-from-iss-mapped.html
Category: Google Maps | May 13, 2013
The Center for Urban History of East Central Europe has created two interesting Google Maps exploring the history of Lviv, Ukraine.
The Lviv Interactive Map shows the locations of buildings, events and people who have been important in the history of the city. The locations are sorted by category and subcategories. For example, the history category of markers includes the sub-categories of Fin-de-siècle City, the Holocaust in Lviv, Jewish city, Postsocialist city, Sacred city, Secession City and Socialist City.
The Plan of Lemberg / Lviv uses the Google Maps API to display an 1863 map of the city, the ‘Plan von Lemberg’.
Using the familiar Google Maps navigation tools users can zoom in on details of the map. Quick links to zoom in on important locations on the map are displayed in the map sidebar. 
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/RDB6Eqq-XTo/now-and-then-on-google-maps.html
Category: Google Maps | May 12, 2013
Two Google Maps really seemed to capture people’s imagination this week; The Flat Route Finder and the Hate Map.
The Flat Route Finder was the most shared map on social media at the beginning of the week. While, after its release on Friday, the Hate Map quickly went viral on social media and almost as quickly was picked up by a number of the websites of the national and international press.
The Hate Map is a heat map of offensive messages made on Twitter.
The map shows the rough location of every geocoded tweet in the United
States from June 2012 – April 2013 that contained one or more of ten
‘hate words’.
The offensive words mapped include ‘racist’, ‘homophobic’ and ‘anti-disability’ terms. Users of the map can view heat maps not only of these general themes but can also explore heat maps of the ten individual hate words.
As a semi-keen cyclist the thing I hate most in the world (after cars, buses and trucks) is hills. I really, really hate hills.
Thankfully I can now use the Flat Route Finder
to find cycling routes that avoid the steepest slopes. The Flat Route
Finder uses the Google Maps elevation service to suggest the flattest
possible cycling route. Two elevation graphs are also provided to show
you the steepest parts of the route and the route itself is colour-coded
to show you the easiest and most difficult stages of the journey.
Also this week, The New York Times published an interesting Medicare Map that shows how much different hospitals charge Medicare throughout the country, for the same treatment.
The map compares the charges made at 3,300 hospitals nationwide for the
100 most commonly performed treatments and procedures. The colored
markers on the map show whether individual hospitals charged less than
the average (blue markers), 1 to 2 times the average (yellow) or twice
the national average (red).
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/woMabgYbfQI/the-google-maps-of-week_12.html
Category: Google Maps | May 11, 2013
The big news in online mapping this week was the launch of OpenStreetMap’s new map editor iD. iD has been designed to lower the threshold for users to edit OpenStreetMap data.
Central to this mission of easing users into the skills needed to add to OpenStreetMap is a great introductory walk-through tutorial. When you first open the editor an interactive tutorial guides you through some of the important features of editing OpenStreetMaps.
iD is a great improvement on the old OpenStreetMaps editing tools and greatly reduces the learning curve for new OpenStreetMap editors.
Ancient Maps of Jerusalem is a great new interactive tool to browse the National Library of Israel’s collection of maps of Jerusalem.
A timeline interface allows users to browse the maps by date. The earliest map is Civitas Iherusalem, dating from 1486 and the timeline includes hundreds of maps, right up to the Map of Jerusalem and Environs, dated 1935.
If you click on any of the map images you can view the map in a larger format. This larger format includes a handy little magnifying glass tool that allows you to view any section of the map in close-up detail. 
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/6HV5xleBy4Q/the-maps-of-week.html
Category: Google Maps | May 11, 2013
The Hate Map is a heat map of offensive messages made on Twitter.
The map shows the rough location of every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 – April 2013 that contained one or more of ten ‘hate words’.
Every tweet was read by a human to determine that only messages meant as negative were used on the map. Users of the map can view three different heat maps, one for homophobic tweets, one for racist tweets and one anti-diasabled tweets. The user can also view individual heat maps for any one of the ten offensive words.
At first sight the heat maps appear to be very simialr to a population heat map of America but if you look in more detail you can see that there is more than just population density at work in hate messages on Twitter. For example, relatively densely populated California, seems to be also relatively free of hate speech.
You can find out more about the methodology behind the making of this map at the excellent Floating Sheep blog. 
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleMapsMania/~3/A23Mdo3kORY/the-american-hate-map.html
