Trending Maps

A Brief History of Google Maps

Sat, 25 May 2013 22:52:01 +0100

Google’s ‘Hello World’ introductory website for the new look Google Maps not only lets you apply for an invitation to the new look map but includes a lot of other interesting information.

The site includes a ‘Tips and Tricks’ section which includes some interesting advice on features you might not be aware of in Google Maps. It also includes a great infographic exploring the history behind Google Maps.

In a A Brief History of Google Maps Pegman walks you through a timeline of some of the important developments in the history of Google’s online map service. As you scroll down the page Pegman walks along a highway on the map showing you when features such as live traffic, Street View and indoor maps were added to Google Maps.

New Google Earth Imagery – May 25, 2013

Sat, 25 May 2013 19:00:01 +0100

It appears that Google has just pushed out a new imagery update! Thanks to GEB reader ‘Georg’ for being the first to let us know about it, and thanks to ‘Baba’ and ‘Munden’ for finding some additional locations. As is almost always the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or […]

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Where's the Path v3

Sat, 25 May 2013 16:55:34 +0100

An old Google Maps Mania favourite Where’s the Path? is now out in a new version that has been optimised for use on tablets and smartphones.

Where’s the Path allows users to compare the UK’s Ordnance Survey maps alongside Google Maps or Open Street Map. The two maps are synchronised, so if you pan one map the other map pans to show the same view.

The application is a very useful resource, particularly for hikers. The Ordnance Survey map has far greater detail than Google Maps about public footpaths and other off-road features. Google Maps on the other hand allows you to view satellite imagery alongside the OS map.

Ans, for those of you obsessed about whether Google Maps or Open Street Map has better map data, Where’s the Path allows you to compare the two maps side-by-side to your heart’s content.

Hat-tip: Mapperz

Bob Dylan, Facebook Crimes & the CSS Map

Sat, 25 May 2013 08:39:31 +0100

Amnesty International in New Zealand has developed an app that analyses your Facebook timeline for possible crimes under international law.

If you connect Trial by Timeline to your Facebook account you can view a map of all the locations in the world where you could face imprisonment for your behaviour. I must remember not to post drunken messages to my Facebook wall if I’m ever in Kuwait.

It should be a crime under international law to listen to Bob Dylan. However Slate has decided to mark Bob Dylan’s 72nd birthday with a map of every street, town, and city Dylan has ever sung about.

If you click on a song’s marker on the Bob Dylan Map you can then click through to read the lyrics of the song or listen to it on Spotify. I was kidding by the way, I love Bob Dylan’s music.

One map kept cropping up in my never ending search for maps this week. The CSS Tube Map recreates Harry Beck’s famous London Underground map using nothing but HTML5, CSS3 and a tiny bit of jQuery. It uses no images.

The map was created by John Galantini, who you may know from his CSS Tardis.

A Google Map of Public Stocks

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:28:03 +0100

The Atlas of Public Stocks is a searchable Google Map of publicly listed companies around the world. The map allows users to locate public companies within definable distances from a given address.

If you select a marker on the map you can view detailed information about the company, including the postal and website address. The details include which sector the company is in. Probably the only thing missing on this map is the ability to filter the companies by the sector. It would be nice to be able to search the map by sector as well as by distance.

The data is there so it should be a simple task to add that option to the map.

Indian Real-Estate with Commute Times

Fri, 24 May 2013 13:01:05 +0100

HouseinCity is a Google Maps based real-estate engine for a number of Indian cities.

HouseinCity allows house hunters to search for a property by location, price, the number of bedrooms and by the property’s builder. In what I think is a first for Indian real-estate websites, HouseinCity also offers users the option to search by commuting time.

The map includes two commuting time options. ‘Metro Connectivity’ overlays a heat map of metro travel times on the map. The heat map shows the average commuting time for a morning commute on the metro. Alternatively, for the driving times of a commute in morning traffic, users can use the ‘Project Connectivity’ option.

It is also possible to display local amenities, like schools, shopping malls etc. on the map. If you select any of the local amenities on the map you can instantly view the travel time that it will take to reach the amenity from your selected location.

The future of the Street View Trekker

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:32:18 +0100

We told you about the Street View “trekker” a few months ago; the amazing backpack-based camera system for adding Street View imagery from remote locations. The folks from TechCrunch have been digging deep into Google’s technology (including great insight into how underwater Street View works), and they’ve spent some time looking at the trekker. The […]

The post The future of the Street View Trekker appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Find Garage Sales & Plan Your Route Map

Thu, 23 May 2013 20:45:01 +0100

gsalr.com is a garage sale, yard sale and estate sale listing service with a handy Google Maps interface and trip planner that can help you plan your weekend garage sale trips.

If you select a sale’s marker on the map you can view details of the sale and click on the ‘add to trip planner’ button to add the sale to your personal trip planner. After you have selected all the sales that you plan to visit you can then click on the ‘View Route and Directions’ button in the side panel to open another map with a planned route and the directions to all your planned sales.

Post Tornado Satellitte Imagery

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:33:08 +0100

Today I came across this Open Street Map of aerial imagery showing the devastating damage caused by the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma.

Unfortunately the map doesn’t have any zoom controls or an option to view aerial imagery of the same location before the tornado struck. The map, however, does include a dynamic URL that gives the latitude and longitude of the current view. Therefore, if you want to compare before and after views of the tornado, you can grab the latitude and longitude of a view and paste it into Google Maps.

The aerial view above shows Plaza Towers Elementary School. Below is the aerial view of the same school on Google Maps, taken before the tornado.

The New York Times has also created two evocative custom Street View images of the devastation caused by the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma - Before and After: 360° Views From Moore.

Victims of the Holocaust

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:25:04 +0100

Since 1997 German artist Gunter Demnig has been creating memorials for individual victims of the Holocaust. Demnig’s stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) are small, cobblestone-sized memorials for individual victims of Nazism.

Each stolperstein is placed in the sidewalk outside the victim’s home. Stolpersteine Online is a Google Map of the memorials that have been erected. The project has created about 35,000 stumbling blocks so far. This is a very small percentage of the total number of victims of the Holocaust, however if you zoom in on any German city on this map you still can’t be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Nazis Holocaust.

SketchUp 2013 released

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:19:01 +0100

Trimble (the company that purchased SketchUp last year) has just released SketchUp 2013 with a variety of upgrades and enhancements. Extension Warehouse The new Extension Warehouse is designed to be a “one-stop shop for anyone looking to customize their copy of SketchUp”, with tons of new features included. LayOut in SketchUp Pro 2013 New in […]

The post SketchUp 2013 released appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

I'll Name that Mountain in One

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:06:32 +0100

Street View Quiz is a series of quiz questions based on Google Maps Street View.

In each quiz question you are presented with a Street View and then have to answer a question related to the view presented. The questions might ask you to name something seen in the Street View or you could get a more general question about something that happened at the location.

Street View Quiz includes a simple interface that allows users to create their own questions by providing a link to a Street View and submitting the question and answer.

GeoGuessr is a Street View geography quiz that sets you the challenge of guessing the locations of a series of random Street View images. Using visual clues, such as the fauna, landscape and street furniture you have to place a pin on a global Google Map indicating where you think each Street View image was taken.

The closer your guess to the actual location then the more points you win.

Locatestreet is a very similar game that presents a series of random Street Views and the player has to guess the country where the image was captured.

The featured terrain, architecture, street furniture and modes of transport all provide clues that can help the player guess the country of origin of the random Street View image. The game also includes three clues for each image, but be warned - if you use a clue you will win less points.

Street View from Moore, Oklahoma

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:00:21 +0100

The New York Times have created two evocative custom Street View images of the devastion caused by the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma -Before and After: 360° Views From Moore.

The custom Street Views were captured on Tuesday and have been synced with the Google Maps Street Views that were captured in December 2007. If you pan either Street View both the before and after image moves so you can compare the images around the whole 360 degrees.

The Times captured two custom Street View images, one at South Avery Drive, between Southeast 4th and 8th Street, and the other at Southeast 4th Street and Heatherwood Drive.

The Polygon Masking Wizard

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:09:02 +0100

I’ve long been a fan of Vasile Cotovanu’s polygon masking effect that allows you to highlight a particular area on Google Maps. Vasile has now released a wizard app that can quickly create the GeoJSON, KML, or Google Maps API polygon code needed to create your own polygon mask.

Geomask allows you to simply draw around an area on Google Maps and just press a button to generate the polygon to create this neat masking effect. You aren’t even restricted to one area and you can highlight as many areas as you want on the map.

The tool is really easy to use. I created a polygon mask to highlight the London Olympic Park and then created a map with the mask in under two minutes using Geomask (you can see the result in the screenshot at the top of the post).

Using a polygon mask is a very effective way to highlight a specific area on a Google Map. Here are a couple of Google Maps applications that have used a similar polygon masking effect to highlight regions on the map.

Der Bayerischer Wald is a great Google Maps guide to hiking routes, accommodation and events in the Bavarian Forest region in Germany.

Ourense en Verde is using the Google Maps API to map the natural beauty of the Ourense region in Galicia, Spain.

Moore, Oklahoma in Google Earth

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:34:32 +0100

As Google often does after horrible events like the tornadoes in Oklahoma this week, Google has created a Crisis Response Page to assist with the relief effort. The map includes a wealth of information including shelter locations, church and school closings, storm reports, a preliminary tornado track and much more. In addition, the +Google for […]

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Finding Food Trucks with Google Maps

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:56:47 +0100

Street Food App is a desktop, iOS and Android app for finding food trucks in a number of US and Canadian cities.

Currently the Street Food App can help you find nearby food trucks in Boston, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Columbus and Victoria. Each city includes an option to view the current location of the food trucks on a Google Map.

Each truck is displayed on the map with a green or red map marker, green markers indicate the trucks currently open for businesses and the red markers indicate that they are currently closed. Users can click on each food truck on the map to view a small review and the truck’s hours of business.

Also See

Tweat It - Google Map of food vendors in New York
Food Truck Maps - tracking food trucks in Los Angeles
truXmap - real-time location map of food trucks in Los Angeles

20 More Museums Added to Google Art

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:24:17 +0100

The Google Art Project is an amazing collection of museums, art galleries and works of art that can all be viewed with Google Maps Street View.

Today Google has added 20 more museums, 1,500 new high-resolution artworks and 16 Gigapixel images to the project. The Gigapixel images include “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. The new museums include the Fondation Beyeler Museum in Switzerland and the Monastery of St. John the Theologian on the Greek island of Patmos

The Many Faces of Google Maps

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:34:32 +0100

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that leads us to see familiar objects in random patterns. For example, when we look at aerial imagery of the Earth we might think we recognise faces in the topography.

onformative has created a computer program, called GoogleFaces, that scans Google Maps satellite imagery looking for patterns that humans might believe are human faces. GoogleFaces scans through one satellite image after another on Google Maps, sequentially along the latitude and longitude of the globe. After scanning around the world it then switches to the next zoom level and starts all over again.

As it scans each satellite imagery the GoogleFaces face detection algorithm records the latitude and longitude of any ‘faces’ it finds. The onformative website has a few examples of the faces already found on Google Maps, including the one above, found in the satellite imagery of Russia.

Tech Maps Around the World

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:29:33 +0100

Companies Near Me is a Google Map of tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The map includes options to filter the companies displayed on the map by location and by sector. The map is primarily focused on the San Francisco Bay Area but the developers say that they have plans to expand the site to include other tech hubs such as New York, Los Angeles and Boston.

Made in NI is a Google Map of Northern Ireland’s start-up’s, tech companies and co-working spaces.

Tech maps for individual cities are now being created for many locations around the world. However we don’t often see attempts to map entire countries / provinces. Made in NI is a nice attempt to map all of Northern Ireland’s burgeoning technology companies.

As well as mapping individual companies, Made in NI also maps wi-fi spots, code clubs and learning spaces.

Also See

Represent Map - a map of tech maps created around the world using the RepresentMap platform

Made in NY - New York’s digital industry mapped
Represent.la - a Google Map of the burgeoning tech scene in Los Angeles

Tech Britain - UK tech map
Tech City Map - map of the technology companies and startups in east London
Cambridge Cluster Map - Cambridge’s high-tech sector

Madri+d Mapa del Conocimiento - a Google Map of Madrid’s research, technology and science companies.

Old Trafford Stadium in Google Earth

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:05:02 +0100

Home of Manchester United, Old Trafford is a historic stadium in England that can hold over 75,000 spectators. Manchester has been playing there for more than 100 years, starting when the stadium opened back in 1910. Ale Zuniga (known as Azz8® in the 3D Warehouse) has constructed an amazing model of the stadium, seen here: […]

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