Crime is an ugly thing, but the folks over at Stamen Design have turned the tables and made something beautiful to track it in the Oakland California area.
Microsoft Virtual Earth was the tool of choice when it came to skillfully building out this Oakland Crimespotting mapping creation. The interactive map tracks crimes that users can subscribe and receive updates about them via RSS and email, from aggravated assault, murder, robbery, arson, burglary, and disturbing the peace. The map pinpoints and highlights the area in which the crime occurred, time, date, and stamps it with an official crime case number. All data is pulled from the Oakland CrimeView Community map.
Stamen hopes that this tool with encourage local governments to use this visual data model and release more information to the public about tree planting, new schools, and other information that matters most to community members.
Google products are no strangers to mashups from all forms of enthusiastic users and 3rd parties, but you know something cool is brewing when Google mashes up two of their most visionary services: Maps and Book Search. Recently on the Google Book Search blog, David Petrou announced this cool new feature, which they've added to the "About this Book" section of books you find in Google Book Search. Now, not all books will that have text about a location or two will get a map link (at least for now), but the ones that do will also include links to the actual pages of the book where a mapped location is mentioned.
Awhile back I reported on Zoomify, a neat desktop app that turns any large image (like a map, for instance) into a Flash widget that lets your web site's visitors pan and zoom around the image without loading the whole huge thing at once. Kinda like Google Maps. Well, the logical extension of that idea is MapLib.net, a free web service that does much the same thing. You upload a big image and MapLib wraps a Google Maps interface around it for panning and zooming to your heart's content. It's pretty easy to use, if a bit lacking in polish. Just upload your image (6,000 x 6,000 pixel, 4MB limit), provide some details like title and description, and wham! it's got a zoomable, draggable interface accessible by a unique URL. You can also add custom markers to the map, and allow other users to do so as well. Best of all, though, MapLib.net gives you a snippet of HTML that allows you to embed your map or image in your web site or blog. I tried it out and though uploading my 4MB image took awhile, the results are decent, but the image quality isn't the best. You can see the fruits of my labor after the jump, or see the full map here.
You may or may not be aware that Wikipedia contains the geographical coordinates for thousands of cities, landmarks, and other geographical features, and there's an ongoing WikiProject to add latitude and longitude data to every place in the online encyclopedia. This is pretty cool, as it allows you to check out a Wikipedia article and jump straight to a Google Maps satellite view or punch the place into your GPS unit. But wouldn't it be cooler if you could do the opposite, i.e. look at a map and see all the associated Wikipedia articles? You know where I'm going with this--Wikipedia for Google Earth. One clever soul has taken a snapshot of the geocoordinates Wikipedia makes available and put them together as a .KMZ file that you can load into Google Earth. There are tens of thousands of coordinate pairs in the nearly 2MB XML file, but they're all logically separated into layers since seeing them all at once is a tad overwhelming. It's available in both English and German, and uses Google Earth's built-in web browser to display the Wikipedia article when you click on a placemark. Very cool.
Who says software and politics don't mix? Google has released an update to Google Earth that adds a "2006 US Election Guide" layer to the cross-platform mapping app. The new layer includes two sub-layers: a "US Election Guide," which adds useful voting information like links to voter registration info for each state, and "US Congressional Districts," which, in case you hadn't guessed, outlines the United States' 436 congressional districts and gives information on the candidates. The Earth-Election mashup was created by two members of the Google Earth team during their "twenty percent time," and Google Earth and Maps director John Hanke says, "Our hope is that young people using Google Earth will make better, informed choices." As always, Google Earth is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Use A Map is a nice simple Google Maps mash-up that bills itself as "TinyURL.com but for Maps," but it's much more than that. Its most apparent feature is that it lets you create a short URL for a location, in contrast to Google Maps' extremely long URLs. It lets you choose a "tag" for your URL, e.g. "santamonicapier," so you can send people to useamap.com/santamonicapier. It also lets you give your tag a description which will show up on the map page. More interestingly, people can leave comments on the map page, the utility of which escapes me just now but I thik it's cool anyhow. I can think of a number of features that would make Use A Map more useful, though. In particular, it lacks any kind of geocoding feature, so you can't type in a zip code or address to zoom to a particular location--you have to click and drag around until you find it by sight alone. Also, it would be great if Use A Map linked to Google Maps proper so one could skip over there for driving directions.
Google has teamed up with the United Nations Environmental Program, Discovery Networks, and the National Park Service to bring a new showcase of Google Earth multimedia overlays. The informative content from the premium content providers can be activated by clicking the Featured Content checkbox in the sidebar on the Google Earth application. Icons will then be displayed across the earth for the special content.
The initial featured content will be provided by the UN Environmental Program, time stamping images that illustrate 100 areas across the world that have suffered extreme environmental degradation. The Discovery Network has provided information overlays that will allow travel enthusiasts the opportunity to virtually visit major world attractions like natural wonders, and cities. National Park Service will show natural recreation opportunities, with park descriptions on more than 10,000 miles of trails in 58 US National Parks. The Jane Goodall Institute overlay will give users the ability to visit chimpanzees and view their daily exploits. This will be updated daily, capturing the work of the Institute's research on chimpanzees and the effects of deforestation in Africa. Another exciting overlay called Turn Here, will showcase free video guides for worldwide restaurants, hotels, and events.
Lots of exciting things are happening with Google Earth. It's a very powerful tool that can be used in the comfort of your home and office to visit places that you might not normally get the chance to visit. Happy virtual traveling.
Remember Monday when I reported on Flickr's new geotagging features, which gives users a nice drag-and-drop interface for "tagging" photos with the location they were taken at? I thought it was cool, but expected it to take off fairly slowly. According to the official FlickrBlog, though, in the first 24 hours more than 1.2 million photos were geotagged by Flickr users. In his post on the blog, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield writes, "When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we'd hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later). Crazy!" Crazy indeed. Browsing around the Flickr map it's obvious he's right--there's way more pink polka dots on the map now, even in my little rural corner of the world. Butterfield also writes a bit about the technical side of Flickr, which will be of interest to my fellow web dev geeks.
Today Flickr seriously pumped up its geotagging support and added Yahoo! Maps integration. The announcement in the Flickr blog links to a few screencast tutorials that make geotagging, i.e. associating photos with particular locations on the map, look pretty easy. It's done through the Flash Ajax-based Organizr tool, and basically you select a bunch of your photos and then drag them to the location you want to tag them with on the map. Similarly, you can explore other people's photos with a new map interface. You can go to flickr.com/map to see everybody's photos and search by location and/or tag. Naturally, it's all done through the Yahoo! Maps API, which means you can zoom and pan around as well as see a satellite photo or hybrid view of the map. The Flickr update also includes integration with Upcoming.org: you can now tag your photos with a special tag for an Upcoming.org event and they'll be displayed on the Upcoming page for that event. Neat.
Today the Official Google Blog is touting an upgrade to Google Maps for Mobile that adds a few nice features. The two biggest new features are for dealing with traffic: First, you can check on traffic conditions without leaving the map. Second, it will now include traffic information when figuring time for driving directions. The other new feature is less amazing but welcome nonetheless: Google Maps for Mobile will now remember your favorite locations and routes, so you don't have to keep typing them in on that tiny keypad. Unfortunately my phone is too puny to handle Google Maps for Mobile, but your probably isn't, so visit the Google Maps for Mobile site or point your phone's browser at google.com/gmm for the free download.
Google Maps has some sweet new features. You can now double click to zoom in! How cool is that. It's a very simple way to check out your desired location...fast! Along those same lines, you can now right double click to zoom out!
There is also a continuous zoom feature that provides a smooth map transition when zooming in and zooming out. No more jaggy and missing squares while waiting for the map to come into focus.
quickmaps is a cool new Google Maps-based web service (or mashup, if you prefer) that lets you get really creative with your Google Maps. Quickmaps gives you a bunch of tools, including a couple dozen markers, line and doodle tools for drawing, and text labels that you can place anywhere on a Google map. Drawing is done with the mouse, and markers and text labels are conveniently drag-and-drop. There's a lot of ways you could quickmaps, but the front page has a few suggestions: "drawing a map to your house, sketching out a cycling or hiking route, or telling everyone where you saw the grizzly bear." quickmaps is super-easy to use, but I was frustrated that in order to remove "doodled" lines you must remove them one segment at a time, which gets old fast. Maps that you create can be saved and shared with your friends. Registration is optional, but if you don't register you can't go back and edit maps that you've saved. And, of course, once you save your map you can embed it in your web site and share it with your friends. I have to say that apart from the doodle-removal issue, quickmaps is one of the slickest applications of the Google Maps API I've seen yet.
Previously KML files were exclusively the domain of Google Earth, but a part of the Google Earth 4 announcement the other day that I missed was that Google Maps now supports KML files, too. KML, in case you're not up on your acronyms, is an XML format that lets you add data to Google Earth, e.g. locations, annotations, pictures, etc. To pull a KML file into Google Maps, just enter its URL in the main search field. For an example of it in action, check out this national parks tour from the Discovery channel.
Despite being mostly a Windows boy myself, I'm really glad to see Google moving some of its apps to other platforms. Today Google announced the availability of Google Earth 4 Beta, which is a free download not just for Windows, but also for Mac OS X (yes, it's a universal binary) and Linux. Aside from going multi-platform, Google Earth 4 sports a new, sleeker interface, support for textured building models with SketchUp integration, and some KML improvements. Head over to the beta site to grab the new release.
Fresh Logic Studios has stepped out of left field with Atlas, a flashy (or should I say Ajaxy?) new mapping service. Basically what Fresh Logic has done is grab the maps from Windows Live Local and slap a slick new interface on it. Atlas is very attractive and has a tabbed interface that devotes a ton of real estate to the map itself while keeping other functions hidden until you need them. This is mostly a good thing, but having some controls unavailable means some clicking around if you want to switch from, say, searching to panning and zooming. Atlas inherits most of Windows Live Local and adds features like gas prices, events, and WiFi hotspot location (only available after you register for free), and feels a bit snappier than Windows Live Local for some tasks. Unfortunately, every time I tried to get directions I got an error message, but I look forward to finding out how that interface works.
Google products are no strangers to 
Use A Map
