Today I was making a quick map using the same feature, and browsed through some of my older maps. I was surprised to discover that my Gozo memory map has received 13984 views. That seems like a lot. I just made it on a lark on a slow day in Malta.
I wasn’t sure where all those map views were coming from. I looked around, and wasn’t able to find a way to search all of Google’s publicly-accessible custom maps. Assuming they’re including them in Google Maps search results, I searched Google Maps for ‘Gozo’ (and variations), and noticed that my map is the only one listed under ‘User-Created Maps’.
I suppose, under certain circumstances, this would be a useful SEO strategy. You could embed links in placemark descriptions and, assuming they looked useful, Google Maps users might click them. I might add some relevant links to some more markers to test if it drives any traffic.
Browsing through my other custom maps, I see that our Sahara trip map has about 6000 views, and our zone-we-want-to-live-in map has about 4700 views. It’s not obvious what differentiates a popular map from an unpopular one. Any ideas?
Earlier this month, I reported that Google Maps was testing walking directions on a small subset of users. This morning, I noticed that Google Maps now is offering walking directions for all Google Maps users.
For example, conduct a search for 200 Madison Ave to 200 Lexington Ave and you will see the option to take “Walking” directions, as opposed to driving directions.
Hmm…I’m underwhelmed. Compare the route from my old Vancouver apartment to Science World. Here are the driving directions, and here are the walking instructions. The only difference seems to be that the walking directions ignore one-way streets. In truth, shouldn’t the walking directions ought to run along the waterfront? Of course, that route would be longer than the prescribed one, but walkers (more than drivers, I suspect) don’t necessarily want the most direct route from point A to B.
Maybe Google needs to crowd-source this problem to optimize the walking routes?
Yesterday, while considering going to a local public house to watch some of the Canucks vs. Minnesota pay-per-view game, I consulted this list of pubs showing the game. It’s just two big, unsortable tables covering all of BC. Unless you’re only looking to confirm that a particular pub is showing the game, it’s nearly useless.
I wondered aloud (as I was by myself), “wouldn’t it be cool if somebody could feed all this data into Google Maps, and I could use that to determine which pubs were closest.”
With some help, I almost got the thing up and running. Then I ran into some roadblocks, got busy and forgot about it.
I still have the same problem. Tonight I’m giving a talk, and wanted to be able to slip out afterwards to catch the second half of the Flames/Canucks game. I figured I’d have another crack at the problem. This time I’ve been successful–witness my l33t mashup skillz!
Here’s how I did it (it’s not exactly rocket science):
I went to the Canucks website and copied all the details–name, address and city–of the pay per view venues. I dumped that data into an Excel spreadsheet.
I needed to associate latitude and longitude values with each address. I used this handy free tool to ‘geocode’ each venue. I added the location data to my spreadsheet.
I imported my spreadsheet into Google Docs. You can see it here.
Somebody has probably already done this in the meantime, but I wanted to see if I could do it myself. It was encouragingly straightforward, and only took me about an hour from start to finish. It’s not perfect–the Grizzly Bar is floating in the Atlantic south of Nigeria–but it’s a reasonable solution to my problem. Steamworks on Water Street seems like the right fit for tonight.
I recently discovered that the satellite photos of Malta in Google Maps are vastly improved. When we planning our trip, Gozo was just a big greenish-brown blur. Now the resolution matches other parts of the world I’ve looked at.
For hilly countryside full of terraces and few landmarks, the new satellite photos are a real blessing. There are a couple of spots I’ve been trying to reach on my bike, but was never quite sure where they are. The overhead view makes all the difference.
I started messing around with Google Map’s newish ‘My Maps’ functionality, labelling points of personal interest around the island. In no time, I was up to fifty points, complete with Flickr photos and the occasional link. Here’s my memory map of Gozo–it’s a work in progress:
Today Neatorama linked to a photo purporting to show two islands linked by a foot bridge in the Thousand Islands region of Ontario:
the island on the left is in canada, the one on the right is in the united states. the smaller island contains the ‘backyard’ of the house on the larger island.
That would be cool, if only it were true. There was debate about the veracity of this in the comments, and a couple of commenters cited Wikipedia:
There is a pair of islands near Rockport called Zavikon. A popular tale among local guides is that the bigger part of Zavikon is in Canada, while the smaller part is in the USA, and the foot bridge between them is the “shortest international bridge in the world”. In fact Zavikon is in Canada.
I’m a casual contributor to Wikipedia, so I thought I’d go try to disprove this myth-busting fact. It took a few minutes with Google Maps, but here’s a satellite photo of the islands that maps accurately to to this aerial view.
This supports Wikipedia’s statement, that both islands are a couple of hundred meters inside the Canadian side of the border. So, it’s a myth that Zavikon’s foot bridge is the shortest bridge across an international border. I wonder what is?
And yes, I’m a massive pedant.
UPDATE: As per the comments below, Richard provided a link to this short video from 1929, depicting his ancestors on the island:
