Maps and Mashups

Shortly after Google launched Google Maps in 2005, the first mashup was created, an automatically generated map of apartments for rent listed on Craigslist. Since then, a huge variety of map based mashups have been created. Indeed, Yahoo! has an experimental tool that creates a map mashup from any site that has addresses!

For the first year or so, creating a mashup required some reasonably heavy duty web programming, not that hard, but certainly beyond the skills of most folks. The game changed when Google added the My Maps feature. Now all you had to do is put down a point, a "push pin" on a map, and add rich content to it. Subsequent users of the map could click on one of your "push pins" and get access to the content you'd created. It gets even better when you can point to images stored in photo sharing web sites like Flickr.

That site and most of the other major photo sharing sites also offer the option of geocoding your uploaded images, that is, you can tell folks where this picture was taken. My new mobile can do this automagically (as soon as I figure out the hopelessly obscure setting to do so...), so every pix is identified as to where I was when it was taken.

So, why am I blogging about "ancient" technology, gosh it's three years old!

Well, 'cause I think anyone who has a web site with some IA content should create interesting maps relating that content. At the very least, you should have a map that shows how to get to your museum or whatever. For things like SIA Chapters, making a map of "interesting" sites in your local area is really easy, and of great value to our outreach mission. A couple of thousand people have viewed the IA Sites In Northern California map linked off the Knight Chapter web site or the Historic Highway Bridges map derived from the Caltrans survey.

Ultimately, I'm interested in "location aware industrial heritage touring". There are MILLIONS of devices out there that know where they are, and can connect to the internet at very high speed. What if we had tools to create a guided tour with rich multimedia content that took you through an interesting neighborhood or wonderful industrial heritage site? We can do this NOW with a LOT of work, but we need to create tools and guidance to allow anybody to do it. Come along, contribute your ideas and gimme a hand!

jay