Clean Up America with Google Maps

Pick Up America is travelling coast-to-coast across America picking up litter. Their mission is to pick up trash across the country and, in the process, educate, and encourage a transition toward zero waste.

The Pick Up America homepage features a prominent Google Map showing the route of the clean-up tour, upcoming events, and links to blog posts about events already completed. The trek began in March 2010 and plans to finish in November.

This year in the spring the tour will be trekking the Utah and Nevada Desert, hiking over the Colorado Rockies in the summer and walking onward to the California coast in the fall.

SOPA Tweets on Google Maps

Understandably one of the top Twitter trends today is SOPA. A lot of major websites around the world, including Wikipedia and Google, are today showing their opposition to the proposed US anti-piracy laws of SOPA and PIPA.

Mibazaar has created the #SOPA Tweets Map to show in real-time the latest Twitter messages that include the hashtag '#SOPA'. The map includes the option to watch either east coast or west coast Tweets appear on the map.

Maps of SOPA & PIPA Supporting Senators

Spatial Situation has created two maps to show congressional support (and opposition) for H.R. 3261 (SOPA) and S. 968 (PIPA).

The Map of Congressional Support for PIPA shows which senators are known to support and which senators oppose PIPA. The Map of Congressional Support for SOPA shows known congressional supporters and opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Both maps also include a pop-up form to contact your congressman about the two acts.

A Personal Travel Itinerary on Google Maps

Tixik.com is a multilingual trip planning application. Using the application it is possible to search for travel destinations by location and by various categories, such as cities, beaches or ski resorts.

Each location features a Google Map as well as detailed reviews of points of interest that can be found at the location. As well as searching by location users can search via a number of categorised dedicated maps, such as a map of the world's longest beaches or the biggest coastal cities in the world.



The application includes a useful trip planner that enables users to save individual locations to a personal itinerary as they browse the website. Users can plan a trip to a destination and save places they want to visit on their trip and even on which day that they wish to visit. You can view an example itinerary for a trip to London here.

Find a TAM Flight with Google Maps

Brazilian airline TAM has released a nice destination finder called TAM Tips. The application allows users to search for vacation destinations based on their personal preferences.

TAM Tips uses Google Maps to show possible vacation locations based on TAM airlines' destinations. The destinations suggested on the map can be refined by selecting categories of interest, for example museums and galleries, sport, music, mountains, beaches etc.

If you click on a suggested destination on the map you can then read a review of the location and view the price of a ticket on TAM airlines to the destination.

Peg it Forward with Google Maps

Why not peg a stranger today? Yesterday Google Maps Mania featured a website called Love Diffusion that tracks cards given to strangers as random acts of kindness.

Gopeg has some similarities to Love Diffusion but is less about the kindness and more about random acts of mischief. Instead of giving cards to total strangers gopeg encourages its users to surreptitiously attach a clothes peg to their person (to the stranger that is - not to themselves - that would just be weird).

Each peg should feature the gopeg website address and a unique serial number. When the stranger later finds the peg they are then able to register the peg before attaching it to another stranger. Each peg that is found and reported to gopeg gets its own Google Map which means users can follow the travels of their pegs as they move from person to person.

Google Maps Opens World Bank Account

Today Google announced an agreement with the World Bank to make Google Map Maker source data more widely and easily available to government organisations in the event of major disasters. Under the new deal World Bank partner organisations, which include government and United Nations agencies, will be able to contact World Bank offices for access to Google Map Maker data.


Google Map Maker Pulse - watch real-time edits on Google Maps

Surprisingly some of the early comments on this new agreement, that I have read, have been very negative about the new arrangement. Personally I'm far from convinced that the World Bank is a benign organisation and I'm pretty certain that it has often had a malign influence on the economies of developing countries.

However this agreement seems to me to be solely concerned with ensuring that the latest mapping data is more easily available to aid agencies and organisations in times of major disasters. Surely, that can only be a good thing.

Read Write Web (RWW) are arguing that Google have appointed the World Bank as "the gatekeeper" of Google Map Maker data. They appear to believe that this move is part of Google's 'closing off (of) access' to its mapping platform. In particular RWW seems keen to connect this new partnership with Google's recent introduction of charges to the use of the Google Maps API.


Google Map Maker

In November I responded fairly negatively to Google's new API charges. However I'm struggling to see how these two separate announcements are connected.

RWW claim that "Google has decided to compete with Ushahidi and other open-source efforts to solve this problem (crisis mapping)". RWW seem here to misunderstand the role of crisis reporting websites like Ushahidi. Ushahidi is built upon mapping platforms such as Google Maps and Open Street Maps. For it to work well in times of major disasters then it needs access to the latest crisis mapping efforts.

With Google's new partnership with the World Bank it appears that agencies and platforms such as Ushahidi now have a clear process as to how they can begin to access the latest mapping data from Google.

In many cases of major disaster the efforts of the Open Street Map community will probably mean that the most accurate and up-to-date maps will be openly available from Open Street Map and not from Google.

Google Maps and OpenStreetMap are two entirely different platforms with different goals. Google Maps relies on more centralised control over the moderating of community map edits than OpenStreetMap (I'm not going to go into the reasons why here). This means that the data behind Google Map Maker isn't openly accessible.

This partnership with the World Bank seems to me be an effort on Google's part to provide a means to access the latest mapping data rather than attempt to close access. I for one think it should be welcomed.

(BTW - I still think Read Write Web is the best tech blog out there)

Pay it Forward with Google Maps

Love Diffusion is a website that aims to promote random acts of kindness.

Love Diffusion passes cards out to absolute strangers. The recipients of the cards can then report their thoughts and stories related to the cards by visiting the Love Diffusion website and then continue the process by passing the card on to another stranger.

The stories of each card as they travel from one stranger to another through these random acts of kindness are recorded on Google Maps. Each card gets its own map and each story reported to the website for the card is added to its Google Map.

The Weather Twitter Map

Wettervolke is a nice Google Maps based application to view the current weather and local Twitter messages about the weather.

The current weather conditions are displayed on a Google Map using the standard weather map symbols. The current temperature is also displayed directly on the map. As well as the current weather conditions it is possible to view a forecast for the rest of the day and for tomorrow's weather.

Overlaid on the map is a Twitter weather window which displays the latest Tweets about the weather from your location. The weather symbols on the map update automatically when you pan and zoom the map. However to view the local weather Tweets users need to use the search box to position the map at the correct location.

Via: ProgrammableWeb

Google Maps of the Week

Two of my favourite maps of the last week were environmental maps that both present users with access to large amounts of useful data.


Vizzuality's Carbon Calculator is a very impressive Google Maps based app that details the potential contribution of any area in the world to climate change mitigation.

The map allows users to draw an area anywhere in the world and view the carbon currently stored in the area, as well as the amount of additional carbon that potentially could be sequestered through restoration.


The United States Environment Protection Agency this week launched a Greenhouse Gas Data Publication Tool that allows users to view and sort 2010 greenhouse gas emissions data from over 6,700 facilities.

The tool uses Google Maps to allow the user to search and display the data in a number of ways, including by facility, location, industrial sector, and the type of GHG emitted. The tool can be used by individuals and communities to identify nearby sources of greenhouse gas emissions.


My other favourite map of the week is not environmentally themed but is impressive none-the-less. HotelMaps.com is a hotel finder that uses Google Maps to help you locate and book hotels near any destination.

What makes HotelFinder.com stand out from other map based hotel websites is the use of dynamic map markers to quickly show the user the price and star ratings of the recommended hotels. Using the map it is possible to search for hotels by date and location but the user can also refine the price, the star ratings and the guest ratings in their search.