Afghanistan on Google Maps

Google Earth Tour of Afghanistan

CBCNews.ca have created an informative Google Earth tour of Afghanistan. The narrated tour provides an interesting overview of the country's geography, history and the current situation.

The tour includes photo overlays and some informative background, particularly about Kabul, Herat, Helmand and Kandahar. To watch the tour you have to have downloaded the Google Earth browser plugin.

Via: Google Earth Blog

2009 Afghanistan Presidential Election

Geocommons have updated their Afghanistan presidential elections map to include the early and unverified partial results of the 2009 election.

The map also contains layers to explore the demographics of the Pashtun and Tajik populations, view threat assessments by province, view the 2009 polling locations and view locations of election day violence.

_____________

Google Maps Goes to Bollywood

BollyTweets

BollyTweets is a Google Map mashup that shows the latest Tweets from a number of Bollwood stars, including Priyanka Chopra, Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat, Uday Chopra, Dino Morea and Karan Johar.

The map lets you select the Bollywood star whose Tweets you want to see from a menu on the left hand side of the screen. When you select a star the map then animates through their last ten Tweets, geo-tagging them by the star's profile location.

_____________

Google Map of European Happenings

Europe: A Never Ending Journey


VisitEurope has created a Google My Map of over 1,000 events happening this summer collated from the tourist boards of Europe.

It is possible to search the map by country and by date. Events are then displayed on the map with blue map markers. Clicking on any of the markers will open an information window with details about the event and links to the event's website.

Also See

• French Summer Festival Guide - French My Map of Summer events
• Disfruta del verano con Google Maps - Spanish events this summer
  
• Alternative Festivals Map - The Guardian's guide to alternative festivals in the Europe this summer.
• The Times UK Festival Map

_____________

Friday Fun on Google Maps

Intercourse to Climax in Four Hours

According to Google Maps it is possible to get from Intercourse to Climax in just under four hours. Any complaints that it never takes you that long should be addressed to Google

Art Fag City

The website Art Fag City has an interesting essay looking at Google Maps Street View as a cultural text, providing an invaluable insight into urban and rural America. Oh, and they also have a great collection of Street View images accompanying the essay.

GPS Drawing on Maps
The New York Times has an article about Tomasz Berezinski's attempts to create GPS track drawings by running and cycling around New York. Tomasz plans, then runs (or cycles) the route with his GPS device to record his progress. He then uploads the “drawing” he has made to everytrail.com.

Via Ogle Earth

Legoland in Street View

Google Sightseeing have been having a lot of fun this week looking for interesting Street Views in Google's release of new imagery this week. They seem to have particularly enjoyed the new imagery in Legoland, California, where, amongst other things, they found this model of Albert Einstein.

_____________

Twitter to Release Geolocation API

Twitter has announced that they will be releasing a new API that will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet.

Currently most Twitter / map mashups use the account-level location field in people's profiles. For example, the well known TwitterVision map animates through Tweets that are geo-tagged by the location entered in each Twitterers profile setting.



Currently there are some crude work arounds to updating your location via Twitter. Some iPhone applications let you change your profile location directly from a Tweet. On the other hand some Twitter Maps allow you to define a location from your tweet by adding a hash tag entry. This is the approach taken in Ben Marsh's excellent #ukhols Google Maps mashup, where users can add a hash tag followed by their post code (zip code equivalent).

The problem with both these approaches is that they both require users to waste some of their valuable 140 characters in defining the location. So Twitter has been crying out for a location API.

Twitter say that they are releasing the geolocation API to platform developers before they add the feature to Twitter.com. It is therefore likely that you will first see the new feature in third party applications before it is added to Twitter.com.

Via: The Next Web

_____________

Obese Smokers Live in the Country

Toronto Star Map of the Week

The Toronto Star's latest Google Maps mashups look at two health related issues. The Obesity Map uses data from the Canadian Community Health Survey to show obesity in Ontario by health region. The Smoking Map uses data from the same survey to show smoking rates in Ontario health regions.

Both maps seem to suggest that obesity and high levels of smoking in Ontario are more prevalent in northern and rural communities, whilst urban areas appear to have lower smoking rates and levels of obesity.

It would be interesting to know if a similar pattern was evident in other regions of Canada and in other countries. If you want to join the debate about why obesity and smoking is more prevalent in northern and rural Ontario both maps have interesting comment sections.

_____________

New Orleans Food Stores on Google Maps

NOLA Food Map

The NOLA Food Map was first created to help returning residents find food in post-Katrina New Orleans. It was designed to help New Orleans residents understand the challenges of navigating in a city with limited numbers of grocery stores and restaurants.

It is possible to search the map by address, zip code or by district. Map markers are categorised into small and large stores, open air markets, restaurants and emergency food relief. Clicking on a map marker opens an information window displaying the name and address of the store and the opening hours.

_____________