Croatian YouTube Google Map Mashup

Rovinjtube

RovinjTube is a YouTube mashup that embeds videos of the beautiful fishing port of Rovinj, Croatia on a Google Map.

The videos featured on the map are all professionally shot tourist videos. There are a number of categories of video to watch, which can be chosen from a slide out animated tag-cloud. The categories include events, culture and live music. There are also videos of local hotels and camp-sites.

Rovinj certainly looks a great place to spend a vacation. And, if you are planning on visiting Croatia you should also check out:

• CROATIA: Interactive Croatia Travel Guide
• Kulturni Vodic - a guide to events happening in Croatia

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New Rival for Google Maps

Claire Murray Map of Edinburgh

It looks like Google has a new rival in the world of on-line mapping. Despite Google's billions, its huge space rockets and satellite department, its gargantuan fleet of street view cars and trikes and the dedicated help of the world's map makers it is unable to compete with one lone wee Scottish lassie.

Claire Murray is the creator of a hand drawn map and guide to Scotland's capital city, which you can buy for only $10. The guide includes: where to find the best breakfasts; real pubs; fancy cocktails; what to do on a rainy day; how to conquer Arthurs Seat and a hell of a lot more.

Now Claire has used the Google Maps API to present her hand drawn map of Edinburgh on-line. The map uses the Google Map controls so it is possible to zoom in on the lovely detail of Claire's map, for example the naked ladies next to the Blue Blazer.

Claire has definitely raised the bar here. Google will have to up their game if they wish to compete in the on-line mapping world. Well, at least in Edinburgh.

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Twitter & Flickr Google Map

GeoImpress

GeoImpress let's you search for Flickr photographs and Tweets from any location in the world. This is a very crowded market to enter. There have been more Google Map mashups that use Flickr than any other website, with Twitter mashups catching up fast.

However GeoImpress does indeed impress, thanks to its wonderful design. Flickr photographs are shown below the map in an animated slide panel that can be lowered or raised as you need to use the map. Clicking on a photo thumbnail will open that picture in a lightbox.

Another really nice feature is the precision slidebar that lets the user define how close to the set location they wish to search. So, for example, if you set the location to Times Square you can get the map to display photos and Tweets from Times Square, or widen the search to get results from the outlying district or widen out further to include the whole city or state.

Yep, I'm impressed.

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Mapping the World's Major Liners

Tropical Ports

Tropical Ports is a website that contains information about cruise ship port schedules for most of the major cruise lines of the world. The site features Google Maps of the world's ports and the live real-time location of a large number of cruise ships.

It is possible to search for an individual cruise ship and view its location and route directly on a Google Maps mashup. The ship's scheduled route is shown with a red line and each port of call is indicated with a flag map marker. The current position of the ship is shown with a ship shaped marker.

It is also possible to see the route of each ship's next and previous voyage.

Other Marine Google Maps Mashups

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Cycling and Walking Journey Planner

New Zealand Journey Planner

The Greater Wellington Regional Council, New Zealand have created a cycling and walking journey planner for the those places that Google Maps just don't go.

The site provides directions for streets but also for walking tracks through parks and reserves. A custom routing engine was created for the map to provide directions for places that Google doesn't cover.

The map includes a predictive search address lookup of all the street addresses in the region. After you have searched for directions, the route is draggable. The map also shows an elevation graph and a calorie counter for the route.

The map was developed for the the Greater Wellington Regional Council by New Zealand based Google Maps development company ProjectX.

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Snapshot Your Google Maps

Snapshot Control

Masashi Katsumata, a Japanese Maps API expert and creator of the Japanese language website Googlermania, has created an excellent utility for the Google Maps API called SnapshotControl.

The utility allows map developers to add a 'snapshot' control to their maps. The control is a button that can be added to a map that will create an image of the current map using the Google Static Maps API v2.

If you are not a developer you can still use some of the example maps that Masashi has created to demo his utility. In particular the Driving Directions demo could be very useful. With the driving directions map you can enter your starting and finishing locations, get your driving directions and then get a 'snapshot' of the route (great for printing out and using off-line).


Via: Google Geo Developers Blogs

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Map of Geographical References

Inside Google Books
The Inside Google Books blog has produced a number of interesting maps based on the frequency of locations mentioned in books during different decades in the 19th century.

The maps below show the number of times a location is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search. The maps were created using MapReduce and Bigtable

1800's


1830's


1860's


1890's

As the Inside Google Books blog points out the maps show the growth and westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century.

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