August 22, 2007 7:50 AM
Look At Where I've Been, Look At Where I'm Going
Back in July I wrote up a post about the fantastical, rapidly evolving world of online map-making tools, highlighting a handful of innovative applications and musing over their demand for bandwidth.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon news that Google had expanded its My Maps capabilities to include the ability to not only easily create custom maps but also embed them on your webpage or blog, ala the YouTube video player.
I wanted to give this a try, so here's a map I threw together in about ten minutes that highlight my travels starting in May at the Killer App Expo in Fort Wayne, IN, and running through October and the FTTH Conference show.
To make this, all I had to do is log in to my Gmail account, open up a map to the location I wanted to tag (in this case, the entire US), click on the My Maps tag, and then start adding markers, complete with brief titles and descriptions about what I did at each location.
I highly recommend anyone trying to find a way to help people visualize anything regarding geography, distance, travel, etc. to give this a try. For example, after seeing what I'd done, my wife has decided to use this technology to create a map of where all the women in her district that work for her company are located as a part of their ongoing efforts to build bonds between these women in the decidedly un-feminine industry of construction and general contracting.
How might you use something like this?
