Cycle the Alps with Street View

Cycling the Alps

Cycling the Alps is a Google Map with a lot of information and some very nice features for anyone who is interested in cycling the Alps.

The application has featured on Google Maps Mania in the past but has recently added some nice Street View tours using the Directions Map widget wizard.

If you fancy a relaxing virtual Sunday cycle ride through the Alps then check out these two trips:

Galbier
Bonette

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The Sunday Best

The weekly round-up of the best Google Maps to feature on Google Maps Mania in the previous week:

OpenFile

Look out newspapers - local collaborative community news sites just keep getting better. Canada's OpenFile, currently reporting on Vancouver, Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa, is one of the best crowdsourced local news sites to enter the field.

One reason for its success is the use of Google Maps to visualise local data sets.

Fish Fight MackMap

In the UK broadcaster Channel 4 are backing a campaign to persuade Britain's fish & chip shops to put mackerel on the menu alongside the traditional cod & chips.

The site is a great example of how Google Maps can be used to support a national campaign,

LikeOurselves

The Location Based Social Networking market is very crowded now. New startups have to carve out a niche in a market already dominated by Foursquare, Gowalla et al.

LikeOurselves just might succeed in competing with the big players, where others have failed, by concentrating on the networking aspect of location sharing. LikeOurselves seems to be much more focused on helping users connect with others and finding other users who share the same interests than other location based social networks.

MDG Maps

MDG Maps is a Google Maps based geovisulisation tool for the Millennium Development Goals.

The Millennium Development Goals are indicators which were agreed by leaders from 189 nations to ensure: a world with less poverty, hunger and disease, greater survival prospects for mothers and their infants, better educated children, equal opportunities for women, and a healthier environment.

What really impresses me with this Google Map is the huge amount of data that can be visualised.

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Google Map of Canadian Baby Names

The OpenFile - Baby File

Canada's new collaborative news site OpenFile has created a number of Google Maps displaying the most popular baby names in Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton-Niagara (2005-2009).

On each of the maps you can click on a postal area and view the top five baby names for boys and girls in the area. Some areas have fewer than five boys' or girls' names, and some have none of either. These areas tend to be either non-residential or low-population districts, or simply have no names that are more popular than others.

Accompanying the maps are a couple of interesting articles 'Why Tenzin reigns in Parkdale' and 'Why Gurleen, and Jayden, and Muhammad, and Joshua rule in Malton'.

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Google Maps Adds A Fuel Cost Calculator

Google Maps has added a fuel cost calculator to driving directions on Google Maps in Europe. At the moment the estimated fuel costs seem to only appear in driving directions in Europe and not in the USA, Canada nor Australia.

The fuel cost estimation appears at the bottom of the driving directions in the map sidebar. If you click on the estimation a calculator opens allowing you to adjust the price, the type of vehicle you drive or switch between petrol and diesel.



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The Big Blue Marble on Google Maps

Earth Snapshot

Earth Snapshot is a website dedicated to the observation of the Earth. The site posts daily satellite images and provides information on storms, hurricanes, fires and meteorological phenomena.

The website includes a map created with the Google Maps API and satellite images from the Envisat satellite. The map also includes map markers to show the location of the last 100 articles on Earth Snapshot.

The articles take a closer look at the most interesting of the latest satellite images. The map markers are categorised to indicate if the related article concerns the weather, environment or a fire etc.

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Friday Fun with Google Maps

Subway Symphony Map

Alexander Chen has built a New York subway map in HTML5 and Javascript. That in itself is impressive but Alexander has improved on Vignelli's subway map by turning the subway lines into the strings of a musical instrument. The strings are played by the movement of the subway trains.

Atlantis Found on Street View

Weekly World News claim to have found the lost city of Atlantis on Google Maps. Whatever you think of Weekly World News' Photoshop skills their claim is at least more convincing than this attempt by the British newspaper The Sun to claim to have found Atlantis in Google Maps' bathymetry imagery.

MacGyver - How to use a Map
In this episode of MacGyver the eponymous hero shows us why Google Maps will never fully replace the good old traditional paper map.



Via: @druidsmith

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Community News on Google Maps

OpenFile

OpenFile is a new collaborative community news site for Canada. Anyone can submit a story to OpenFile and reporters are then assigned to the story. However anyone can add comments, images, video and helpful links to the story.

Currently OpenFile covers four cities: Vancouver, Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa. The dedicated page for each city includes a Google Map that shows the location of the user submitted stories.

If you select any of the map markers you can then click through to read the story in full. The web page for each story also includes a smaller Google Map highlighting the location of the story.

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