Fun with Google Maps!

I use Google Maps on a regular basis for getting around, as I am still relatively new to Melbourne and have a tendency to get hopelessly lost whenever I venture out of the central city or the few suburbs I am semi-familiar with. It was also a huge help to me when I was living in Japan, as there are frequently no street signs and addresses work off a 'block' system. 

There are many potential uses for information management with Google maps, as you can add 'pins' onto a map, save a map, and add extras like images or links to websites. This can then be used as a tool to find out information about the location as well, such as photos, notes or links. You can also collaborate on a map, meaning more than on person can add information to it. We could make a map of all of the libraries in Melbourne, with links to their opening hours. Or their careers pages!

This is a map I made with a few places in Tokyo where I used to live, work, and hang out. I would like to keep adding to it, as it is a nice way to keep my memory of where places I used to go were in relation to each other. Interestingly, they seem to have upgraded maps, and this one appears quite differently to my older one below. I will need to play around with it more to work out how to make this silly box disappear, because I can't figure it out!

 

When I first arrived in Melbourne and was not yet working, I amused myself by making a map collecting addresses for one of my hobbies, so that I could see 'clusters' and plan an excursion to a particular spot, stopping along the way. I made one for all of the op shops in the Melbourne metro area accessible by public transport, working off addresses I found through various websites and blogs.

I also collated the following Map which lists all the fabric stores I am interested in visiting. When I did a Google search for fabric stores, I found that I could save their map address to my own map. If you click on a pin, the store name is shown, the address and a link to the shop's website come up.

View Fabric Shops in Melbourne in a larger map

I hadn't heard of the term 'mash-up' except in the musical sense, where an artist or DJ takes two different songs and cuts them together to make a new piece of work (with attendant copyright issues I won't go into here).

Mash-ups allow you to pull in data from different sources around the web, and use coding to bring them together to make something new.

I investigated Pipes, a tool which allows you make mash-ups without being a programmer! It is pretty easy to use, and allows you to join together different units (representing code and commands) and create a new output, to use as a widget on your website. I couldn't really think of what I wanted to do, so I decided to take a look at what was already available.

Here is a great Google Maps mashup I found. Geoguesser is a really addictive game that tests your geography knowledge. It is powered by Google Maps, and you use Streetview to try and guess where in the world you are. Once you make your guess by putting a pin on the map, it shows you how close you got and allocates points. Don't play it before you finish your homework!