The Google Maps of the Week

The New York Times' Your Biking Wisdom in Ten Words is a handy reader's guide to biking in the Big Apple. The map includes readers' tips on good and bad biking locations and a number of popular cycling routes, care of Strava users.

I like the use of the red and green markers on this map to indicate where positive and negative comments have been made. I also like how some of the small information windows are permanently open to highlight a section of the comments across New York.


Pier Paolo Pasolini was an extraordinary Italian poet, writer and director. La Cinémathèque Française in Paris has developed a Google Map to explore Pasolini's life in Rome. The map is a "journey to the heart of what constituted and defined him: friendship, literature, politics, love, sex, cinema."

The Pasolini Roma Map contains locations important in the life and work of Pasolini, interspersed with commentary, photos and clips from the artist's films. The map also includes a number of entries by Žilda, a street artist from Rennes (France), whose collages summon the phantoms of Pasolini at the corner of Roman alleyways.


I'm always a sucker for these clever Google Maps based marketing campaigns. What is very clever about this campaign from Burberry is that the use of Google's Geo API's is so subtle that most users probably won't even be aware of the mapping technologies driving the application.

Burberry Kisses uses a number of Google's geo-apps to present the journey of a (sealed with a loving kiss) message from your lips to the home of your loved one. The app presents skylines of famous locations around the world which have been captured from the 3d buildings used in Google Earth.

The Google Geocoding API and the Google Places API are used by the app to identify locations and important landmarks on the journey. Google Maps Street View is also used to show the reflections of famous landmarks in puddles in the city street scenes used in the app.