January 10th, 2009, 3 Comments »
Back in October, 2007, I was messing around with Google’s then-new ‘My Maps’ feature. I made a map of all my favourite spots on Gozo (here’s the related blog post), the Maltese island where we lived for nine months. I added a bunch of Flickr photos and a couple of links to this site.
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?
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January 3rd, 2009, 1 Comment »
Every street and avenue in Manhattan is mentioned in a song. Okay, that’s technically not true. Well, it might be true, but I don’t have time to prove it. Still, in my time wandering around lower Manhattan, every street seemed to remind me of song lyrics. A few examples:
- Delancy Street - “Hey remember that time I found a human tooth down on Delancy” - “That Time” by Regina Spektor.
- Lafayette Street - “Well, I’m standing on the corner of Lafayette” - “That Was Your Mother” by Paul Simon (though, admittedly, this may refer to a street elsewhere in the country).
- Mulberry Street - “I’m a big man on Mulberry street, I play the whole part, I leave a big tip with every receipt” - “Big Man on Mulberry Street” by Billy Joel (also references a bunch of other Manhattan streets, for example, “Houston to Canal street”).
- Sullivan Street - “Take the way home that leads back to Sullivan Street” - “Sullivan Street” by Counting Crows.
Wikipedia lists a (Circle Line) boat load of such songs. That would be a fun crowd-sourced Google Maps mash-up. Get people to identify songs, mark them on a shared Google map and link them to an audio file on the web. You’d end up with this groovy musical collage of the city. Then, of course, you could expand it to the whole planet. Somebody get on that, would you?
1 Comment »
March 25th, 2008, 9 Comments »
Two and half years ago, I described a local search problem:
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!
Er, you can check out the completed map.
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.
- I ran this wizard from Google (thank you, Webware) to turn my hosted spreadsheet into a location-rich Google map.
- The wizard generates some code, which I subsequently hosted on a dedicated page on my site.
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.
9 Comments »
September 4th, 2007, 5 Comments »
The folks at Lonely Planet pitched me on this, and I actually thought it was pretty cool. They’ve launched a new service called Pick & Mix (currently only for Mexico, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, so I guess it’s in beta) which enables you to buy individual chapters of their guidebooks. From the email I received:
To give people a chance to try Pick & Mix, the first chapter from each guide is free. Also, because we know how important it is to travel with current information, chapters are available prior to the release of the book. Right now, the new editions of the Guatemala and Baja guides are available via Pick & Mix in advance of the book release.
This is a pretty smart approach, because I often end up hauling around guidebooks and only using a small portion of them. For example, we bought a Hungary guidebook for our recent trip to Budapest (there were no Budapest-only books available on Malta). We barely left the capital on our trip, so eight-tenths of the book was just dead weight.
How Much Does It Cost?
I was checking out the Pick & Mix books, and noticed that there were some significant differences in price. Some chapters cost about four cents a page, while others cost as much as ten. I asked my Lonely Planet contact about it, and he said:
We considered different models, including iTunes-style flat pricing, but it just didn’t seem fair to charge the same for a 10-page chapter as for a 100-page chapter (our longest chapter, believe it or not, is a 244-page monster). So in the end we opted to base chapter prices on the price of the book, and the length of the chapter.
So, a long chapter with more information costs more than a short chapter. And a chapter from a $30 book costs more than one from a $15 book (assuming they’re a similar number of pages). About 80% of chapters ended up costing between US$2-4.
Is this a more environmentally-friendly option? I’m not sure. The printing industry no doubt has some efficiencies which means that the cost of printing one book is less impactful than printing out a hundred pages on your printer. But then you do avoid the resources expended on printing the cover and gluing the book together.
5 Comments »
August 29th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Well, that’s a uniform designed by committee, isn’t it? How does that idiom go? Try to satisfy everyone, and you’ll satisfy no one. There’s nothing wrong with it, per se. It’s just a kind of lame mishmash of recent iterations. Is something a ‘mash-up’ when it’s good, and a ‘mishmash’ when it’s bad?
Here’s the official announcement with a clearer photo, and
photos and reactions from Kimu, The Chief Canuck, Nephrus, Rebecca and, uh, Living Sword.
8 Comments »
August 22nd, 2007, 3 Comments »
A couple of months back, my friend Rob Lewis had an idea for a little Web project. Rob’s the new CEO of Techvibes, and has the enticing challenge of transforming it from a creaky, Web 1.0 social network to something compelling and relevant in 2007.
Rob saw this map of the web in Montreal, and figured we could do something similar in Vancouver. I decided to use Translink’s familiar zone map as a background, so I set to work painstakingly recreating it.
We planned to announce our little project at BarCamp, so we decided to produce the first map with Vancouver’s Web 2.0 companies. We partnered with the good folks at Bluelime Media to turn my map into a site, and I really dig the retro fridge theme they came up with.
You can check it out at Techcouver.com.
Some Pretty Vague Criteria
We did our best to identify as many appropriate local companies as we could. My criteria were pretty vague, frankly, but then, so is the term itself. If we missed your company, apologies. There’s a link on the site to get added to the map–just click the fortune cookie fortune (odd, but grammatically correct, I think). I know Rob’s already received a couple of requests.
All of the companies that we found are clustered around downtown, so you kind of lose the whole Translink zone map effect. It’s a pity, too, because it took me hours to trace from Bowen Island to the Fraser Valley. Ah well, a future map will no doubt feature companies in suburban business parks.
Subsequent maps might include mobility companies, medium and large tech companies and so forth. Eventually we might even create some slick Ajax interface which enables us to fit all the companies on one map. For now, though, they’re categorized.
Here’s an interesting tidbit: in doing this project, I discovered that you can open up and modify Translink’s incredibly detailed PDF maps in Adobe Illustrator. That wasn’t any use to me and my zone map, but it’s a top tip if you need to hack up a map of Vancouver.
3 Comments »
