Awesome (and useful) Mashup Example

We've all seen numerous examples of "mashups", or webmaps containing information from multiple resources, in the past year. Of course, I'm a big fan of the mashup... I'm also a big fan of finding a great mix between form and function, as anyone who's involved with cartographic design can attest to. This mashup appears to have captured this essence quite well, combining simplicity, good cartographic design and decent ergonomics. It's also open source! Oh, and did I mention that it's highly useful?

http://sanfrancisco.crimewatch.org

...and for you East Bay-ers

http://oakland.crimewatch.org/

Location, location, location

Two interesting articles from Wired via the Map Room.

1. Wired magazine's tips on getting better GPS reception.
2. Clive Thompson's article Future of the Web: Location, Location, Location asks: How is the return of geography (via location-aware cell phones et al) going to change our lives?

Ghost Maps

There are over 35 million geotagged, time-stamped photos on flickr now. That's enough to start doing some pretty interesting analyses, including this one from Crandall, et al., at Cornell (presented at the WWW 2009 conference, "Mapping the World's Photos" [PDF]).  Not only is it possible to map hot spots of world tourism, but by incorporating the time stamps to map the routes people are taking, you can make out individual streets. As suggested by the Information Aesthetics blog, you could even design popular walking tours.

Once GPS-enabled cameras represent a larger share of the market, flickr may provide data for all sorts of important analyses: tracking SOD, the migration of an endangered song bird, or estimating the "desolation" of a place: the world heat map that the Cornell group presents looks shockingly like the lights at night. The machine... it's ALIVE!!!

Georeferenced historic photos in Yosemite

I saw this guy present his project about revisiting sites of historic  photography in Yosemite (1980's and 1910's,1920's).  Obviously, it reminded me of our own VTM project.

OakMapper 2.0 released

Hi y'all. The new OakMapper 2.0 is up and running, and we'd like your help in mapping areas of oak mortality around the state. Version 2.0 improves upon the website's prior version with increased functionality and additional tools within an easily navigated interface.  Launched by the UC Berkeley Kelly lab in October, OakMapper 2.0 makes it easier for users to explore data, download maps, look at images of oak mortality, and submit suspected locations of oak mortality that may be associated with SOD.  The new interface utilizes the familiar background layers and navigation tools from Google Maps.  Users are able to draw points and polygons directly on the map as well as attach photos to specific points.  The Kelly lab encourages the public to use this site to map suspected cases of SOD and to track their submission by signing up for an account with OakMapper.  Registered users of the site can update their information and make comments on other users' points.  Official confirmations of P. ramorum are clearly separated from community-submitted points and either set of points can be filtered out.The new OakMapper is found at oakmapper.org.  Please consider signing up to be an OakMapper user! The OakMapper was recently featured in the recent journal of the Bay Area Automated Mapping Association

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Global disease alert map

Here is yet another exciting use of the GoolgeMaps API.... HealthMap aggregates outbreak data by disease from numerous sources (news, personal accounts, and official alerts) and displays them by location in real-time. It's a collaborative project brought together by the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. If you're not a germaphobe now, you may become one after taking a look at the map; be sure to check it out before your next international trip or even if you stay around here. For example, did you know that the West Nile Virus has infected 78 people in California this year? Even closer to home, there was a TB scare at Kaiser in SF last week.

GPS on a Mac

I have been doing some GIS noodling on my Mac recently, since it is an Air and very nice. So, what can you do without parallels on a Mac? Lots. The new QGIS with Grass plugins is great, but if you want to just get your hiking points in and overlaid on an image, you can use GPSbabel. Also free (with suggested donations though, and it is a good thing). You can download your waypoints, tracks and routes from your Garmin (I used a GPSMap 60CSx) with GPSbabel (use the GPX format) and use the GPS plugin in QGIS to easily map them. But, going the other way? that is more difficult. I used GPSbabel with csv format (x, y, id) and uploaded an important route to my Garmin. I was feeling all adventurous until a colleague sent me this link: ben sinclair's site: how to use a garmin with your mac which sorts it all out for you.

UPS and Google Maps Mashup

In the spirit of tracking, I stumbled upon this UPS tracking site: http://trackthepack.com/.

Mashup challenge

The Official Google Maps API blog recently featured this post about NetSquared's mashup challenge. Non-profits can post their mashup dreams and then project managers and developers at NetSquared pick projects to offer assistance. You can explore the proposals thus far at the their project gallery.

Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0

John Deck was way ahead of Google when he created Berkeley Mapper. His service includes a feature that allows users to input point data into a Google Documents spreadsheet. The data is then added to a database and displayed in Google Maps. Well, Google has just released its second version of its spreadsheet mapper. Similar to Berkeley Mapper, users simply enter their data into a spreadsheet and the appropriate KML and Google Map are generated. There are still many differences between the two tools and Berkeley mapper is more tailored to the needs of collaborative research. Nonetheless, Spreadsheet Mapper offers yet another option for compiling and mapping tabular data.