Man, I love Google. They just keep giving us the good stuff. The latest is My Maps which lets you draw, annotate, link, and add multimedia to your Google Maps. The tools are simple but very powerful. I love this idea. I loved it when all of these folks built their own implementations use the Google Maps API. Unfortunately, I never loved it enough to muck around with those setups. Now, I don't have to. Google has made it dead easy.
To try it out, I made a map of the locations from my Photo Hunt that ran on this blog back in 2005. It was very easy and a lot of fun. You just click the map to drop a locator and then type your title and text. If you want to add links and photos, just switch to HTML mode and edit away. I found that the rendering will respect img attributes like align and height. You can use height to limit the rendering size of an image that might be a little large for the locator description. The only drawback is that you need your photos to already be online. They don't (yet) have an image upload feature like Blogger does.
These maps are really a lot of fun to make and they will be great for your friends and family to view too. I've written enough about geotagging in the past for you to know I'll be making maps of my vacations :)
Next up, I plan to map some of the cycling routes around town that I enjoy. My Maps is great! Thank you Google.
2007-04-07
My Maps Impresses
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2 comments:
That is a great tool for vacations. Drop a marker at local restaurants and entertainment sites visited on your trip and the next time you, or anyone you know goes, just pull up the map. You can remind yourself what places were worth another trip and where they were. Keith and I will have to give this a try on our honeymoon for the next time we go to Europe.
Agreed, great for letting someone know the cool places you found on you trip.
I would like to have a "My Map" of all the great restaurants I have found in my various travels. Then, when someone is going to an area, I won't have to recommend they go to "this really cool Mexican place like downtown somewhere", I can give them exact directions.
I had the same thoughts as you on the maps mashups. Sounded cool, seemed like something I could use, too much mucking. This fixes all of that it sounds like. Time to go exploring...
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