Unlocking Google’s Hidden Maps

Google's My Maps is a free tool that allows users to create custom maps. It's particularly useful for planning trips, visualizing geographic data, or sharing directions and locations with others.

Given the popularity of My Maps, there are likely millions of maps containing valuable local knowledge created by users around the world. Unfortunately, Google does not provide a centralized directory or searchable index of all public My Maps. While some public maps are technically indexed by Google, they are not easily discoverable through standard search methods.

This is where mapShare steps in - to fill in what the developers believe is a major gap. mapShare is a new platform designed to help users share and discover custom Google Maps. It acts as a community-powered discovery engine for My Maps, allowing users to tap into the vast but often hidden world of public custom maps.

🔍 Search by Location or Subject

You can use mapShare to search for maps based on either geographic location or topic. Whether you're looking for coffee shop guides in Tokyo, historical walking tours of Edinburgh, or national park maps in the U.S., mapShare makes it much easier to uncover useful and relevant maps created by Google's My Maps users.

📂Create and Curate Lists

Found a bunch of amazing maps about cycling in Europe or vegan eats in New York? With mapShare, you can create your own lists of favorite maps, organized however you like. These lists become personal libraries of curated knowledge - ideal for trip planning, research, or just collecting inspiration.

👥 Share With Friends and Family

Planning a group trip? Exploring your city with a partner? With mapShare, you can share your map lists with others, via a direct link or through social media, making it easy to collaborate or simply pass along helpful info.

Drawbacks

At the moment, when I search my neighborhood on mapShare, I’m met with a "results not found" message. This highlights one of the current drawbacks of relying on the crowd to curate Google’s My Maps. As an early adopter of mapShare, you may also encounter gaps in coverage - gaps that will only begin to close as the platform gains more users and contributions.

Google My Maps

The future of online mapping - colored markers

It has been an exciting couple of years for online map developers, what with the incredible development of Leaflet.js, the emergence of great narative mapping platforms, such as Esri Story Maps and the recent release of Mapbox GL and Mapbox Studio.

The emergence of so many great mapping platforms has challenged Google's once almost monopolistic position in online map development. In fact these days it is becoming increasingly rare to actually see a great online map which was developed with the Google Maps API. Nearly all the great, cutting edge maps that I see these days are developed on other platforms.

I've actually been waiting two years to see how Google would respond to this dwindling market position in map development. The answer has finally arrived:

Google has renamed Google Maps Engine Lite - My Maps!

All joking aside, this is probably a sensible move by Google. Google seem to have made the decision to let the Google Maps JavaScript API slowly die from neglect. Their energies have instead gone into developing mapping for mobile platforms and trying to monetize Google Maps through Google Maps Engine.

Google Maps Engine Lite was obviously meant to be a free entry level mapping platform that might hook some users into upgrading to Google Maps Engine. The problem is Google Maps Engine Lite is very basic and creates fairly ugly maps. I'm sure a lot of potential customers for Google Maps Engine (which is itself a very good and powerful mapping platform)  looked at Google Maps Engine Lite and thought 'Why would I pay for this?'

It therefore makes sense for Google to disassociate Google Maps Engine Lite from Google Maps Engine and rebrand it as My Maps. My Maps is an effective entry level, tool for non-developers to quickly create simple maps. It really isn't a stepping-stone to Google Maps Engine.

+1 Your Favorite Maps

Google has added the +1 button for Google Maps. If you find a custom map that you really like you can now share it with your friends by clicking the +1 button. By clicking the +1 button you are also helping to rate and promote the custom map.

You can find the +1 button underneath the map description on custom maps. Any custom maps that you have created yourself or that you have found and saved can be viewed by clicking the 'My places' tab.

Via: Google LatLong

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Maps of the Nashville Flood

Tennessee Department of Transport: Smartmap

The Tennessee Department of Transport's Smartmap uses Google Maps to show weather-related road conditions, construction/incidents, camera images and message signs for the state.

If you zoom in on Nashville and select the 'Road Condition' option you can view the currently flooded roads and Nashville road closures.

Tennessean.com - Flooding Incidents Map

Nashville newspaper the Tennessean.com has created a Google Map to show incidents of the Nashville flood. The map shows the locations of shelters, missing person reports, fatalities and public transit cancellations.

Staff of the Tennessean.com are working to keep the map up-to-date.

NOAA: Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service

You can view near real-time data for the Cumberland River in Nashville with the National Weather Service's Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service. At the time of writing the NOAA shows the river level at nearly 51 feet (the major flood stage is from 45ft) and a flood warning is in place.

The site includes a Google Map showing the location of the gauge reading. If you click on the 'upstream gauge' or 'downstream gauge' links you can navigate to other gauge measurements of the river.

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Google Maps Finds Location of Pipe Bomb

PDXBoom Map

At about 8pm Sunday night in Portland, Oregon a large explosion was heard by many people. Geo-developer Reid Beels quickly set up a Google My Map so that people who heard the explosion could show their locations.

Using the open collaboration setting in Google My Maps he allowed people to add coloured map markers to the map to say whether they heard the explosion or not. Red markers meant they 'heard a loud boom, windows or building shook', blue markers that they 'heard it, but no further detail', yellow indicates it was 'heard with no shaking' and green indicates the explosion was not heard.

The clustering of the markers soon suggested that the explosion originated near Sellwood Bridge. Using the map the police were able to pinpoint the location of the explosion and discover that it was caused by a detonated pipe bomb.

Via: ReadWriteWeb

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Analysing the Content of Google Maps

Floatingsheep.org
I can't believe I haven't heard of this blog before but I'm delighted that it has finally come to my attention. Floatingsheep.org is dedicated to mapping and analysing user generated Google Map placemarks. The results of this analysis provides a fascinating insight into the socio-political make-up of places.

The blog has a series of interesting posts examining what Google Maps users are adding and where. For example this post compares the number of book stores and churches added to Google Maps across the USA.



The analysis finds that, for the most part, the relative prevalence of book stores occurs in and around the big cities and the eastern seaboard. Whereas suburban areas surrounding large population centres show a near-universal favouritism for churches.

Another great example is this look at User Created Geographies of Religion, which looks at religious references in user-created content on Google Maps around the world.

There are a number of other interesting analysis of user-created content on Google Maps. I strongly recommend you visit floatingsheep.org if you have a few hours to kill.

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A Virtual Protest on Google Maps

Taksim

In Turkey a number of websites, such as YouTube, are banned. To protest this web censorship Taksim are organising a virtual protest via Google Maps.

The site uses an embedded Google My Map, which anyone can add themselves to by using the 'edit' button. Users are encouraged to add themselves at Taksim Square in Istanbul. When the protesters achieve the target number, the plan is to walk to Parliament House in Ankara, pixel by pixel.

Via: Read Write Web

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Google Maps Launches in Kenya

Google Maps Kenya

Google have today released Google Maps for Kenya. Detailed maps of many Kenyan towns including Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, and Nakuru are now accessible at http://maps.google.co.ke/ or through Google Maps for mobile.

Google Maps for Kenya already has a number of My Maps of user-generated content, as well as thousands of business listings for the wider Nairobi area.

The My Maps include, Julie's Favorite Places, by talk show host Julie Gichuru, Humphrey's Favorite places by Humphrey Kayange, Kenya Rugby 7's team captain and Wangari's Eco-spots by Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Winner.

Via: Official Google Africa Blog: Google Maps launches in Kenya

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March Madness Google Map

March Madness 2009

Adam Hughes, of Google, has produced this Google Maps My Map of the locations of this year's 13 tournament venues in the NCAA. In addition it is possible to see the locations of the 65 tournament teams' campuses.

Each map marker includes a link to the website of the team.

Via: Google LatLong: Mapping the Madness returns

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Google Maps Adds User Content

Google have today announced that higher quality user generated content in Google My Maps and in kml's will be added to Google search results in Google Maps.



This is good news for map developers. If your content shows up in Google Maps search results it will obviously drive significant traffic to your maps. This page tells you how you can submit your kml's to Google.

Via: Google LatLong: Will It Blend? Yes!

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Cleaning up Australia, One Map at a Time

Clean Up the World

Clean Up the World is a global campaign that inspires communities to clean up, fix up and conserve the environment. Held in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme, it mobilises an estimated 35 million people across 120 countries.

This last weekend 630,000 volunteers joined together in Australia to take part in Clean Up Australia Day. They collected nearly 8,300 tons of trash. Clean Up the World encourages its participants to use My Maps to chart their activities,and this year Clean Up the World chairman Ian Kiernan AO visited several clean up sites and added photos and text to a My Map along the way with the new My Maps editor for Android using the HTC Dream phone.

You can see the resulting Clean Up Australia Day 2009 Google My Map here.

Via: Google LatLong: Cleaning up Australia, one map at a time

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My Map of Amsterdam Plane Crash

Fairly soon after the crash of the Turkish Airlines Flight on landing at Amsterdam's Schiphol international airport this My Map of the crash was one of the biggest retweets on Twitter.


View Larger Map

I wasn't going to link to the map because I didn't think it added much to the news of the crash. However the map has now been picked up by a number of websites.

If you are interested at looking at the statistics about a My Map just click on the comments link on the main Google Maps page (enlarged map). The statistics about the Schiphol map are available here.

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Texas House Speaker Google Map

Texas State House Speaker Map

This Google Map from Texas Watchdog shows the declared candidates for Texas state House speaker, including the incumbent speaker, Tom Craddick, and his challengers from both parties.

The map was created using Google My Maps so can be viewed directly in Google Maps or embedded in the Texas Watchdog website. Each candidate is represented on the map by a colored marker, red or blue, depending on their party.

The information window for each candidate contains links to further information about the candidate.

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Referencing Multiple My Maps

goKML.net
Barry Hunter of nearby.org.uk has created a way of creating a link to multiple My Maps at the same time. With Google’s My Maps feature you can display multiple maps at once simply by ticking the boxes of a number of My Maps. However the ‘Link to this Map’ feature only ever links to one of those maps. Therefore it has not previously been possible to send a link to a group of maps to someone.

Barry's tool allows you to enter the KML links for a number of My Maps and produce a single KML which will load all My Maps into Google Earth or Google Maps. As an example, I threw together some random My Maps for London (Blue Plaques, some videos, the My Map for I Feel Romantic) and created this single KML. The KML can be opened in Google Earth or you can right click and cut and paste the link into the search box in Google Maps.

I think this is a great innovation. It is now possible to mix up a whole range of My Maps of an area and create a link to send to your friends. Barry whilst creating this new service also noticed that Google My Maps now come with RSS Feeds.



This is another useful facility from Google Maps. It will be particularly useful for My Maps that are open to collaboration as the feed can be used to update you when additions are made to a map. As an example here is the feed to the I Feel Naughty (NYC) MyMap.

Via: Ogle Earth (Stefan Geens is currently using goKML.net's multiple My Map link creator to map his current trip of Sweden).

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