The Google Maps of the Week

I am increasingly impressed with the creative ways that marketing teams use Google Maps Street View to create viral campaigns. The Volkswagen Street View Quest is up there with the best.

 
The Volkswagen Street View Quest is a game created by Volkswagen South Africa which invloves contestants finding Volkswagen cars in Google Maps Street View in South Africa.


The game is very simple. You just need to navigate around South African streets using Google Maps Street View. When you find a Volkswagen car you then drag and drop a map pin onto the car in the Street View.

There are four quests in the competition and the winners of the four quests will take part in a live Street Quest Grand Final to win a host of prizes.


The Internet Map is a Google Map of the 350,000 largest websites in the world. The map was created by Ruslan Enikeev and the Russian creative agency Positive Communications.

The circles on the map represent individual websites. The size of the circle is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. The location of websites on the map is determined by the links between sites. The more traffic generated from links between different websites then the closer the websites are displayed on the map.


Meograph allows anyone to easily create, watch, and share interactive stories on a Google Map or with the Google Earth browser plug-in. Until today only selected media producers have been allowed to use Meograph to create narratives. Now anyone can sign up and start creating their own interactive stories.

Narrated stories created with Meograph can include photographs, video and audio narrations. If you want to see what is possible with Meograph then have a look at some of the mapped interactive stories already created on the Meograph Demo page.