Kimi Raikkonen in new Apple Maps Ad

Good Roads for Bikes on Google Maps

The Cyclist's Road Map is a crowd-sourced Google Map for cyclists that provides a handy guide about the quality of roads around the world.

Cyclists can submit reviews of roads based on the quality of the road surface, scenery and the amount of traffic on a road. Roads that have already been rated are color-coded on the map, green indicates roads that have been recommended by other cyclists and red indicates that the road has been deemed to be a bad road for cycling.

If a user selects an individual road on the map they can view the road's overall rating and also view the road's individual ratings for the road surface, scenery and traffic levels.

Go Karting on Google Maps

A few famous motor racing tracks are featured in Google Maps Street View. Using Street View you can virtually drive a lap of the Laguna Raceway, the Thunderhill Raceway, the Infineon Raceway, Silverstone and Monza.

Now you can also take a spin around the indoor go-kart track in Ayslebury, UK.


If racing driving isn't your cup of tea then why not imagine being a matador instead by visiting the Plaza de Toros in Valencia.

Many other Sports Stadia around the world now include Street View imagery. Google Earth Hacks has a good collection of many of the stadia now featured on Google Maps Street View in their Sports Stadiums section. 

Twitter Ticker-Tape Parade on Google Maps

TwitterMap is an interesting Google Map of geo-located Tweets. The map displays the profile pictures of each Twitter user and animates the posted Twitter message, scrolling marquee fashion, above the Twitter user's name.

The map is an interesting way to view in real-time what people are saying around a particular location. The same developer has also created a Google Map that displays recently posted Flickr photos around locations.

FlickrMap displays thumbnail images of Flickr photos on top of Google Maps. Users can click on an individual thumbnail picture to view the photograph in a larger window. Using both maps in conjunction is a good way to view real-time media around a specific location and could prove particularly interesting during specific events and breaking news stories.

Finding a Job with Google Maps

JobKaster is a Google Maps based job search application. Using the app job seekers can search for jobs by location and also submit their location, professional skills and resume to potential recruiters.

Jobs are displayed on the map using markers that show the name of the company recruiting. If users click on a map marker they can view details of the positions on offer. The details section includes an 'apply' button that will take the user to the recruiting company's own jobs page.

JobKaster can also be used by companies to post their currently available positions.

Currently JobKaster only works in the USA but the site has plans to broaden coverage soon to other countries.

Green Buildings on Google Maps

The Green Building Information Gateway is a global platform for exploring and comparing the green dimensions of buildings. The project from The U.S. Green Building Council helps users discover green buildings around the world.

The GBIG Map shows the location of green buildings across the globe. It is possible to view the buildings in map or list form. If you select a marker on the map you can click through to view details about the building's green credentials in a number of categories, including building materials, energy and water efficiency.

Spotting Wildlife with Google Maps

The I-90 Wildlife Watch is using Google Maps to create a crowd-sourced wildlife monitoring project. The project is inviting motorists to report wildlife sightings along I-90 in the Snoqualmie Pass region of Washington.

The aim of the project is to gather information about wildlife on the I-90 to help inform highway planning. The Snoqualmie Pass region is a critical link in the north-south movement of wildlife. With the help of these crowd-sourced reports the project hopes that measures can be introduced to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions and enhance the safe passage of wildlife in the future.

Have You Sent Your Street View Cards Yet?

There has been a huge increase in the clever use of Street View in marketing campaigns this year. It is easy to get a little blasé now about marrying animation and live video with Google Maps Street View but this new Christmas marketing campaign from Stella Artois is incredibly well done.

Stella Artois' Christmas Carole app on Facebook allows you to enter an address and then creates a video in which a band visits the address and plays you a song. The Street View of the address is used as a backdrop to the video so that it appears that the band is actually playing in your street. The video includes a zoom effect, using Google Maps Satellite View to zoom in on the address.

There are a number of other nice touches in this app, like a falling snow effect. Of course wrapping the whole thing inside Facebook means that users can also share the app and send personalised messages to their Facebook friends, using their addresses.

Botswana and Canada on Street View

Chobe National Park

Botswana has today become only the second African country to get Street View coverage on Google Maps. There has also been lots of new Street View imagery added in Canada.

Now Google Maps users around the world can explore Botswana’s unique scenery and world-renowned game reserves, like Chobe National Park.


Monkey and deer. Pan the Street View around and there is an elephant as well.

There is also new Street View imagery available in Canada. The new imagery includes panoramas captured in the isolated Nunavut hamlet of Cambridge Bay in Canada's Arctic far north.



Via: Google Africa Blog and Google Canada Blog

Is This the Most Gorgeous Map Ever?

Oh man this is beautiful! Plane Finder has released a new Route Map that looks just all kinds of gorgeous.

The screenshot above doesn't do this map justice.You need to open up the map and then click on any of the airports displayed on the map - that's when the beauty happens. After clicking on an airport neon lines fly out from the airport to show all the destinations that you can fly to from that location.

It's a simple formula really:

 a styled map + animated polylines = poetry in motion

Miami Art Fair on Google Maps

Next week is the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair (Dec 4-9). The Art Basel Miami is the largest US contemporary art fair attracting over 60,000 collectors and galleries from around the world.

REFINeDr is a free, interactive website and smartphone app that puts Art Basel Miami fairs, galleries, artists and events on a searchable Google Map. The app allows users to find out what is happening in the fair,  discover all about the venues taking part and view expert recommendations on artists, artwork and galleries.

If you are looking for events to attend then you can use the app's excellent search tools that allow you to refine the results displayed on the map by date and by time.

Users will also have access to world-class art news and reviews from Blouin Artinfo in a special Art Basel magazine on the REFINEDr site. The map was created by Cartographic design agency, Carticulate in partnership with The Fulton Group.

Instagram Photos on Street View

The Beat is one of those great ideas that you just can't help wishing that you had thought of yourself. There are a lot of Google Maps based Instagram apps but I think that this is the first one I've seen which has made the inspired choice of using Street View. How better to convey the sense of where a photograph was taken than to show you what it looks like with Google's 360 degree panoramic imagery.

Using The Beat it is possible to view photographs submitted to Instagram on top of a Street View of the location where the picture was taken. If you enter a hashtag search into The Beat you can just sit back and watch as a stream of Instagram images, placed on top of Street View, plays on your monitor.

The hashtag feature is a great way to search for interesting photographs around a theme or an event. For example, if you enter 'Thanksgiving' into the search you can view a selection of Thanksgiving photographs submitted to Instagram.

The only real omission to The Beat is a pause feature. It would be nice to be able to pause interesting photographs for a closer look and to be able to explore the Street View of the location for a little longer than the app currently allows.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

The Man Responsible for Google's Non-Island

The Culprit

Last week you might have heard about the non-discovery of an island called Sandy that appears on Google Maps. There has been a lot of fun had at the expense of Google Maps for showing an island in the Coral Sea that doesn't actually exist but today I can reveal the true villain of this mapping error:

Captain J W Robinson, captain of the brig Velocity in 1876

The Back Story

Last week scientists from the University of Sydney revealed that they had sailed to where Google Maps shows a Pacific island called Sandy and had found no island and just a whole lot of sea. 

Today the Auckland Museum revealed that a trawl through their huge collection of historical maps turned up a 1908 map which shows the island. According to the map the island was discovered by the Velocity in 1876.



The Velocity

Searching on the National Library of Australia website I discovered that the Velocity was a whaling brig. Amazingly the library actually has photos of the ship. This one was taken at dry dock in 1870, six years before she 'discovered' Sandy.



Even more amazingly the library has a photograph of William John Maguire (see the top of this post), described as a 'sailor on the brig Velocity'. The photo is dated to 1870, so it is quite possible that Mr Maguire was actually on board Velocity in 1876 when it 'discovered' Sandy. However Mr Maguire is not the villain of our mapping error, that award must go to the captain of the Velocity, who in 1876 was one J W Robinson.

Here is a newspaper report from The (Hobart) Mercury, dated 11th March 1876, which names the Velocity's captain:

"THE whaling brig Velocity returned from an unsuccessful voyage yesterday. She brings 3 tuns of sperm oil. Captain Robinson reports that he sailed from this port on the 12th March 1875, and proceeded to Cato's Bank. After cruising there for some time without success he proceeded to the Middle Ground. Had seen only three whales during the voyage, one of which, a small one, yielded the quantity which constitutes the Velocity's take".

Sandy Island was not the only island 'discovered' by Captain Robinson. Captain Robinson also 'discovered' Heard Island. This island also features on Google Maps and actually seems to exist and is clearly visible in Google Maps satellite view.

The (Hobart) Mercury reported in 1929 that Captain Robinson, "in exploring, discovered that there was an island previously uncharted here, and named it Heard Island." Unfortunately however this seems to be another unfortunate 'discovery' for J W Robinson. According to Wikipedia Heard Island was actually discovered by an American sealer, Captain John Heard, who sighted the island on 25 November 1853 and had the island named after him. 

What's Happening on Google Maps

Google Maps applications that display upcoming events and concerts have been coming thick and fast this month. Two weeks ago Google Maps Mania reviewed HUGE city, a map that displays nearby Facebook events, and Concert Mapper, a Google Maps based application to find and book tickets for concerts, theatre or sporting events.

Now a new Google Map has been released that can help you find out what is happening nearby, using listings from Facebook events, Eventbrite, Meetup and Upcoming. Mapify.us uses categorised map markers to show from which listing service each event comes (using the initial letter of each service). The markers are also color-coded to show whether the listed event is happening today, tomorrow or this week.

Death by TV on Google Maps

It may be a cliché to state that 'most accidents happen in the home' but I personally didn't realise that flat-panel television sets are a growing cause of serious injuries. According to TV Safety.org because of their height and thinness flat-panel sets easily tip over causing injury and sometimes even death.

The TV Safety Map shows the locations of accidents caused by television sets as reported by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The map can be searched by location and the results displayed on the map can be filtered by accidents causing 'death', 'injury' and 'other injuries'.

On the map design front the TV Safety Map has some very nice round information windows that pop-up when the user mouses-over a map marker.

The Google Maps of the Week

This week I was impressed by a number of mapped based data visualisations.

The UK's Office for National Statistics released a new map that compares data from the 2011 UK census with the 2001 census. The Census Map allows users to view population and age data from the 2011 census and compare the results with the data from the 2001 census. The Canadian Census Map, on the other hand, is a great way to explore data from the 2011 Canadian census.This mapped visualisation uses Google Maps to allow the user to browse data from the census related to 'families', 'people' and 'languages'.


The New York Times this week published A Survey of the Flooding in NYC After the Hurricane.

The survey uses Google Maps to show the estimated height reached by floodwaters from surveys and weather data collected by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Users of the map can select individual neighborhoods on the map to view data on floodwater heights at individual building plot level.

A number of neighborhoods on the map include black boxes. If the user selects any of the boxed neighborhoods they can read an overview of the damage caused in that neighborhood by the storm and view photographs of the damage caused.


The car ride company Uber has created some nice Google Map visualisations of their journey data looking at the number of trips taken between different neighbourhoods in a number of cities.

In Mapping the San Franciscome (full map here) you can see the popularity of journeys between San Francisco's different neighbourhoods. 35 of San Francisco’s neighborhoods are examined in the visualisation. At the centre of each neighborhood is a circle, the size of which represents the proportion of rides that flow into that neighborhood.

Every neighbourhood that sends a ride out has a line of the same colour as the source neighbourhood connecting it to its destination. The weight of each line represents the proportion of rides that go from the source neighbourhood to its target.

Live Music Reviews on Google Maps

#GDNGIG is a live music Google Map from The Guardian newspaper. The map hopes to capture the excitement and unforgettable moments at live concerts and share the experience with the rest of world.

If you are at a gig then you can share your photos, thoughts and reviews with the #GDNGIG map by posting a Twitter message, an Instagram photo or a comment on nOtice with the tag #gdngig. Bands themselves can also post their own photos and comments to the map. The Vaccines, Band of Horses, Dry the River, Tegan and Sara, and Aluna George are among those who have already used the #gdngig tag.

Judging by the current mapped reviews the hashtag seems to have only been adopted by UK gig goers but there is no reason why the map shouldn't work for live music worldwide. 

Twitter Trends on Google Maps

If you want to know what people are talking about right now around the world then Twitter is probably the best place to go. Twitter's trending algorithm identifies the most discussed topics on the micro-blogging platform and even displays the top trends by location.


Twordly is a Google Map which shows what is trending on Twitter around the world.

The application allows the user to view what is currently trending in different countries and even lets you drill down and view trending subjects at city level. If the user clicks on a map marker an information marker opens displaying the current top trends at that location. Select a trend on the map and you can then view that hashtag on Twitter.


TwitTRENDS also allows users to view local top trends on Twitter with a little help from Google Maps.

To use the application users can click anywhere in the world on a Google Map. A list of the nearest places nearby that are available as geo-located 'Trends' is then loaded beneath the map.

If you click on one of the cities listed you can view the top trends on Twitter for that location. Click on one of the trends and you can view the latest Twitter messages about that trend.


Trendsmap is probably the best map of Twitter trends. The map shows recent trends on Twitter live on a Google Map for any location that you choose.

Move the map and zoom in on any location and the Twitter trends shown on the map will update in real-time. The map is live, so if you leave the map zoomed in on one location you can see the trends growing and changing on the map over time.

When you click on a trend you can see the Tweets updating in the trends window. For each trend clicked on it is also possible to review a trend graph so that you can see the peaks and troughs of that trend over time, both locally and globally. Pictures that have been posted about that trend will also appear in the window.

Street View at Prayer

Outside Street View of Lincoln Cathedral

For a while Google Maps has steadily been increasing coverage of inside Street View for businesses, stores and museums. It is now also capturing Street Views inside a number of cathedrals.


The main nave of Lincoln Cathedral

In the UK Lincoln Cathedral has indoor Street View. For almost 300 years after it was first built Lincoln Cathedral was the tallest building in the world. In Google Maps you can now explore the main nave and the Chapter House.


The view from Salisbury Cathedral roof

Salisbury Cathedral also has some beautiful indoor Street Views. Salisbury Cathedral has Britain's tallest spire. Exploring the Street View in Google Maps you can get a wonderful view looking up into the inside of the spire.


Looking up the Salisbury spire 

New York's opulent St Patrick's Cathedral also has indoor Street View. The cornerstone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral was laid in 1858 and her doors first opened in 1879.


Click on any of the images above to view the Street View depicted on Google Maps

The UK Census on Google Maps

This morning the UK's Office for National Statistics released a new map that compares data from the 2011 census with the 2001 census.

The Census Map allows users to view population and age data from the 2011 census and compare the results with the data from the 2001 census. The visualisation uses two Google Maps placed side-by-side. Different variables from the census data can be selected from a drop-down menu.

If the user selects a census tract on either map they can then view a breakdown of the census results in a drop-down table, comparing the 2010 and 2001 census returns.

Other variables will be added to the map as this data is released from the 2011 UK census.

The Canadian Census on Google Maps

Canadian Census is a great way to explore data from the 2011 Canadian census.The visualisation uses Google Maps to allow the user to browse data from the census related to 'families', 'people' and 'languages'.

One very clever feature of the map is that it allows users to explore the data and different granularities depending on the zoom level of the map. Zoom right out and you can explore the data at province level. As you zoom in on the map you can explore the data at ever smaller administrative levels, right down to the smallest census tracts when you zoom right in on the map.

New York Storm Damage on Google Maps

The New York Times has published A Survey of the Flooding in NYC After the Hurricane.

The survey uses Google Maps to show the estimated height reached by floodwaters from surveys and weather data collected by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Users of the map can select individual neighborhoods on the map to view data on floodwater heights at individual building plot level.

A number of neighborhoods on the map include black boxes. If the user selects any of the boxed neighborhoods they can read an overview of the damage caused in that neighborhood by the storm and view photographs of the damage caused.

Explore the UK's Wildest Terrain

Honda are promoting their CR-V compact SUV car in the UK using Google Maps Street View. In order to encourage potential customers that they could really use a SUV Honda has put together a wonderful collection of Street Views of the UK's wildest terrain.

Do More New allows users to enter a postcode and then shows a beautiful Street View of somewhere nearby that they can visit. Users can choose from a number of terrains, including mountains, snow, forest and urban.

Overlaid on top of the displayed Street View are the current weather conditions and the option to view places to stay overnight.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

Google Indoor Maps Now on the Desktop

Indoor floor plans can now be viewed on the desktop version of Google Maps. One of the great features of Google Maps on mobile phones has been the ability to view indoor floor plans. Now you can view the same indoor maps on Google Maps for the desktop.

If you want to know which venues have floor plans available on Google Maps you can check out the list here. A great bonus for Google Maps API developers is that you don't have to do anything to get the indoor floor plans to appear in your apps, as they are now part of the base Google Maps map tiles.

Unfortunately at the moment you can only view the main floor of a venue and don't have the ability to change floors as you can on Google Maps for mobile. I'm guessing this feature will be eventually added as it exists in some indoor Street Views, for example in the White House Street View imagery.


In other news the Google Map Maker team has introduced badges for contributors to Google Map Maker. The badges can be won for a number of different contributions, from editing on Map Maker to attending Map Maker events.

You can view a full list of the available badges on the Google Map Maker website.

Steam Groups on Google Maps

The Steam Community Map Browser is a pretty visualisation of a large network of Steam Community members. The Steam computer game distribution platform allows players to create and join groups which the map has accessed through the Steam Web API.

The circles on the map represent Steam groups and are clustered close together if they share a large number of the same players. The map tiles were created using the Gephi interactive visualisation platform.

Some of the larger and more interesting groups on the map include map markers which when clicked on reveals information about the group in the map sidebar, including a link to their Steam Community page.

Tracking City Flow with Google Maps

The car ride company Uber has created some nice Google Map visualisations of their journey data looking at the number of trips taken between different neighbourhoods in a number of cities.

In Mapping the San Franciscome (full map here) you can see the popularity of journeys between San Francisco's different neighbourhoods. 35 of San Francisco’s neighborhoods are examined in the visualisation. At the centre of each neighborhood is a circle, the size of which represents the proportion of rides that flow into that neighborhood.

Every neighbourhood that sends a ride out has a line of the same colour as the source neighbourhood connecting it to its destination. The weight of each line represents the proportion of rides that go from the source neighbourhood to its target.

Uber has created similar mapped visualisations for nine other U.S. cities. You can view static images of the maps on this Mapping a City's Flow blog post.

The Pure Charity Google Map

Pure Charity is a global charitable giving platform. Non-profit organisations can submit their charitable projects to Pure Charity and potential donors can browse the accepted projects for charities they wish to support.

One way to browse the charitable projects is on the Pure Charity Google Map. The map highlights the non-profit organisations supported by Pure Charity around the world. Users can click on the project map markers and learn more about each project, such as the project's aims, the amount of money needed to complete he project and how much money still needs to be raised.

Australian Floods on Google Maps

Geoscience Australia's Flood Map is using Google Maps to present data on historical flood mapping in Australia derived from satellite imagery.

The current map is a proof of concept which over the next two years will be developed into a nationwide portal to provide data on flooding which has been observed by satellite since 1987. The current map shows flooding data from MODIS images from 2000 to 2012. Because of cloud cover in satellite imagery the flood data is produced from eight days of satellite imagery.

The water data displayed on the map is detected from the satellite images using an automated flood mapping algorithm created by Geoscience Australia.

Via: All Things Spatial

Post a Message on Street View

Perfume manufacturer Issey Miyake has created a Google Maps application that allows you to leave a message on Street View anywhere in the world.

Please the World is a fun little application that allows anyone to type in a message and then to leave it on Google Maps Street View at any location. Once you have placed your message on your chosen Street View you can share your message with friends via Facebook and/or Twitter.


Once you have left your message you can then go on a little balloon journey courtesy of Issey Miyake's Escape application. After you share your location with this app you can view an animation of a balloon taking off from your home, with a little help of Google Maps satellite view, and then watch as it ascends through the clouds.

Russian Army Maps of the World

Maps for the World is a collection of downloadable historic maps. Each of the maps in the collection can be browsed and selected via a handy Google Maps interface.

The collection currently includes Russian Army Maps, Russian Topographic Maps, The Russian Internal Waterways Atlas, Old Russian Army Maps and US Army Maps. Individual maps can be selected via a drop-down menu and the selected map will load as an overlay on a Google Map.

If you select an individual map tile you can click through to download the selected map. Alternatively the Maps for the World Google Map can be embedded in a website or you can grab a link to any map view.

Designing Google Maps with Style

Last week on Google Maps Developers Live Paul Saxman talked about how he designs a few of his favorite map styles, and shared a few of his tools and techniques for designing maps for visualisations. The video of the talk is a good introduction of how and when you should use the Google Maps Styled Map feature.

The video includes a number of examples of interesting map styles with some particularly good examples of how to style a map to emphasise colours in heat maps. These ideas were used recently in this excellent visualisation of ship movements during WWI.


The Navy of WWI animates 12 years of location data, starting before the outbreak of war and ending when trade routes resume after the war's end. As the animation plays the ships' tracks are displayed on the map and stand out because of the choice of colours in the map style and the tracking polylines.


Diehl Group Architects also created a neat style for their contact page. Being architects DAG used a map style that really emphasises the buildings on the map.


But styled maps don't always have to be in black and white. Designer Peter Smart travelled 2517 miles to try and use design to Solve 50 Problems in 50 Days. Peter used Google Maps to document his journey and the work he completed along the way. As you might expect from a designer his map looks fantastic. 


The Global Transition to a New Economy is a Google Map designed to showcase projects around the world that are part of a new developing economy. The map is a nice example of how map styles can be used to create a map that complements the colour scheme used on a website.


If you want to play around with Google Map Styles yourself then the Google Maps API Styled Map Wizard is a great place to start.

Finding Cheap Flights with Google Maps

Skypicker is a low-cost flight search engine for Europe that wants to make it very easy to find the cheapest flights.

Skypicker is primarily aimed at travellers who aren't concerned about the dates of flights but just want to quickly find the cheapest flights to a chosen destination. To this end the site uses a Google Maps interface that allows users to simple click on a country or individual airport to set a starting point and a destination.

Once two countries or two airports have been selected on the map Skypicker displays the cheapest flights with important additional information, such as departure dates and the duration of the flight.

Hangout at the Palace of Versailles

Hangout Quest is a fun Google+ game that involves you tracking down famous works of art in the Palace of Versailles. In the game you can compete against friends in a Google Hangout to find selected paintings.

At the beginning of the game you are shown the painting that you must find. You then need to virtually explore the corridors of the Palace of Versailles in Google Street View. As you walk around the palace in Street View you are given clues as to whether you are hot or cold in your search.

The winner is of course the first person to find the painting.

Once you have finished playing hunt the artwork on Google Hangout then why not head over to Google Art Project and find out a little more about the paintings that you found in the Palace of Versailles.



In Art Project you can explore galleries around the world. Many of the galleries include Street View imagery which mean that you can virtually explore the artworks on display. As you walk around the galleries in Street View you can click on individual paintings to find out about the artist and the art work.

You can even zoom in on details in the selected paintings. The two screenshots above both show the same painting. In the screenshot taken from Art Project you can see how close you can zoom in on individual paintings.



If all of this has whetted your appetite to find out even more about the Palace of Versailles then you can visit the Google World Wonders Project. The World Wonders Project allows you to explore the palace in 3d using the Google Earth browser plugin. The project also includes a number of videos about the palace and a number of photographs from Getty Images and Panoramio.