geo2web.com

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MAPme.com - A Community Based Mapping Project

MAPme.com a social mapping site which allows everyone from travelers to special interest groups to create and contribute locations by suggesting ‘Hotspots’ and other information that other members of a map might be interested in.

Filters include ‘weirdness’ - in this case the ‘Dancing Elvis Troupe‘ in Tokyo

These travel guides are community maps where other members can leave comments or photos or even submit their own locations. Usually, these suggestions will either be added directly to each map, or they go into a moderation queue assigned to the map owner (depending on the type of map).

“Each map is like a new post in a geographic forum”, says John McCann, who managed the development of the site. “We have given the map owners as much flexibility as they could ever need in terms of being able to moderate location data, but we’ve also allowed for options for public and personal maps – public maps are generally a free for all, and personal maps are for mostly private use”.

Global Development
The development of the MAPME project took around 6 months, and was achieved on a shoestring budget by outsourcing work to all corners of the globe. Programmers working in the UK, Philippines, The Russian Federation and Australia patched together the MAPME application using open source software including the CAKE rapid development framework and of course the Google Maps API

Complexness
According to Robin Metcalfe- the lead developer of the project, the most complex undertaking was getting the permissions system right, and working out how to allow users to effectively explore a map that might have 500 or 500,000 markers. “We don’t have a map with 500, or even 5000 Hotspots on it yet, but I think our system can handle it”.

Community Mapping
While community mapping is relatively new concept and something that hasn’t really taken the online world by storm (yet), MAPme.com is also excellent for creating travel or city guides that are useful in their own right. Take for example this guide to Cebu, in the Philippines;

http://www.mapme.com/map/cebu

Future Applications
Apparently a Facebook Application, and Map Widget (built in Flash) are on the way, but for the time being map in can be exported in GPX format (easily transferable to portable GPS devices) or by KML. You can even keep an eye on any map activity by subscribing to the RSS channel for each guide.

MAPme is a great looking new site in the ilk of Flagr.com and Platial.com but on a global scale which is easier to use and better to look at. With the addition of an exportable map widget, this could easily be the best web 2.0 community mapping site on the net.

Map your World at http://www.mapme.com

Overall there is a lot of content already and subject matter that might call for some over 18’s certification but on the whole the site works well with the sense of being part of a geo-community mapping project.

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My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell is one of our favorite books of all time. Part memoir and part ethnography, My Tiny Life is about the social life of the online, text-based virtual world LambdaMOO and his own brief encounter with it in the early ’90s.

We first read it just as we were starting out with our ‘30 Days in ActiveWorlds‘ work, its influence can be seen in our paper 30 Days in ActiveWorlds - Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World (.pdf download).

My Tiny Life has been republished via lulu and is available as a free download, if you haven’t read it before then enjoy…

Picked up via http://kuehleborn.org/

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Every now and again work comes to your attention that makes you think ‘wow’ - Daden Ltd have imported Google Maps into Second Life and it has just eaten up most of our morning.

The movie below illustrates the highlights of their work and our exploration:

Music by Destri.

Second Life is still a hard sell to local councils or local authorities, Daden’s work with Birmingham City Council is certainly interesting and we applaud the progress so far.

As for issues of copyright with regards Google Maps/Imagery in Second Life, that raises a whole different issue between cross platform usage. We cant see Google sending a cease and desist unlike the Ordnance Survey with our Second Life work…

See Daden Ltd for more info, thanks to Mal Burns and his excellent Twitter feed for the heads up.

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Yesterday, Peter Batty announced a new social-networking application that operates within Facebook: whereyougonnabe? In beta (naturally), this app lets you map your current and future activities and see what (and where) your friends are doing at the same time. The idea, apparently, is to see when you and your friends are in the [...]

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I’ve talked about the Carbon Project here in the past related to their Developer tools and Gaia viewer. It was nice to see this article in Mass High Tech highlighting their recent National Science Foundation grant to further development of their ((Echo))MyPlace software. Sounds like they are targeting this summer for a wide [...]

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It’s Valentine’s Day. For millions of people, that means a day filled with outpourings of love, diamonds, and chocolate. For another gazillion people, it means cursing Hallmark and wondering why people can’t keep their professions of love to their damn selves. Here at the Maps API blog, we are equally embracing of all [...]

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Google has announced a new Google Maps feature which allows you to refine search results on a map by ‘Neighborhood’ or ‘User Rating’.

For example, if you search for pizza restaurants in New York you might be given a bewildering number of results. Using ‘Neighborhood’ you can refine your search by restricting the results [...]

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I am excited to see that David Rumsey’s maps have come to life in Second Life, the extremely popular online, 3-D world. It’s such a cool idea: historical maps in a virtual world. I’ve spent hours playing with the Rumsey maps that appear in Google Earth, sliding back and forth between today’s borders [...]

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Our forthcoming reader contributed book ‘The Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces’ has spawned a companion entitled ‘The Worlds Best Urban Places and Spaces’ it comes courtesy of Russell Davies and Dan Hill.
To quote Russell on our notion of producing a blog reader contributed book:

I thought that was a really interesting idea, a [...]

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Second Life has a beta version of its viewer now available using the WindLight atmosphere rendering system.
The results are definitely a step up in the rendering quality of Second Life as the screen grab from our panoramic ’step inside’ globes hopefully illustrates. The beta viewer is well worth a download with the latest [...]

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Our Flickr pool is slowly but surely filling up with submissions for the forthcoming book on the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces. The book is in the spirit of Web 2.0 in that its content is created by you the readers of Digital Urban.
Embedded below is a slide show of the images [...]

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The geoblog of a pedestrian in San Francisco..

This headline on a Digg article recently caught my eye:
Most Original Geoblog (Using Google Maps API) I’ve Ever Seen
With well over 700 diggs I decided to take a look… A large, urban, full screen satellite toggled view of Google Maps comes into view with a recognizable [...]

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VerveEarth - Geo-browse blogs, feeds and news!

VerveEarth is a really cool new Google Maps mashup that lets you discover new blogs and news for a geographic area anywhere in the world. When visiting the landing page of VerveEarth you are greeted by the number of feeds that are waiting by continent. I [...]

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New Facebook apps using Google Maps:

Our Places - A Facebook app that combines Google Maps, Bigtribe Geohana, and Facebook. [via]
TinyURL-style Google Maps Facebook tool - Provides you with a free map that has a short URL, making it easier to send to friends.
My Camps Facebook App - Facebook application for [...]

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