Customize Your Google Maps
by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on May 22, 2010 • google maps • COMMENT
We’ve done a lot of work with Google Maps and are glad to finally see some major improvements being made with API v3.
Cartographers around the world will be super delighted over this – Styled MapTypes!! This update now allows you to toggle features on and off (roads, parks, water, transit, etc) and create a new color scheme for Google Maps. Here’s a nice set of potential colors. What will you come up with?
Your Resume is Boring
by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on March 10, 2010 • google maps subway visualization • 1 COMMENT
Ed Hamilton, a copywriter, created his CV in a Google My Map! It helps that he’s had a very diverse career that has taken him from the UK to Vietnam and Trinidad & Tobago. It’s very simple, yet creative and effective, as it should be.
What have you done with your resume lately??
Below are a few other map and visualization-related resumes I enjoyed. I didn’t see many out there – any geographers have a creative resume you want me to post here?
The infographic:
The subway map:
We Lost Our Homes!
by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on August 3, 2009 • google maps • 1 COMMENTI spent some time working with recently released foreclosure data (January-June 2009) this past weekend [via RealtyTrac].
You almost always hear about the struggles of California and Florida, and Vegas and Phoenix but how bad is it really? They.. DOMINATED – CA, FL, NV, and AZ have combined to capture 29 of the top 30 metropolitan areas with the highest foreclosure rates.
The Las Vegas-Paradise metro area (Paradise??) took top honors with a 7.45% foreclosure rate, or one every 13 housing units. Damn. How did your city do?
Now I haven’t actively looked for 2008 data or any years past, but I’m sure they’re out there. Depending on how I feel and the feedback I receive, I may or may not turn We Lost Our Homes! into a larger project and learn a few new things along the way — the best reward of them all!
Apple’s Final Macworld
by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on January 8, 2009 • apple google maps • COMMENT
By now, most of you have heard about Tuesday’s Macworld without Steve Jobs (he’s recovering, hooray!). His sub, Paul Schiller, introduced the new iLife ’09 package that included a healthy dose of map related products.
What I’m referring to is the iPhoto ’09. Aside from fancy face recognition and Flickr/Facebook support, this new version clearly takes advantage of geotagged photos.
Here we see geotagged photos displayed on Google Maps within iPhoto. Organizing photos by date is great but sometimes browsing by location is the best method.
It also has the capability to convert lat/longs to city names.. I’m thinking iPhoto ’09 takes care of it.. either that or I don’t properly know how to use my iPhone. (photo1) (photo2)
The next maps are from when you wish to create a photo album for printing purposes. It’s a real map!! Pretty nifty if you ask me. Where they pulled it from, I can’t tell. But from what I see, it automatically colors in the subject country, populates it with cities in which the photos were taken, and arrows to tell you the direction in which you were traveling. I think it’s fantastic although I haven’t come across anyone who seems as interested or excited as me.
And last but not least, we have a Google Earth-like globe featured in iMovie ’09. Again, very well made and looks cartographically appealing as well! How smooth it is, I won’t know until someone buys me iLife ’09. Ok? Thanks!
Achieve D.C.
by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on November 13, 2008 • achieve d.c. google maps • COMMENTLess than 12 hours after submitting my entry for Apps for Democracy, I was notified that I won the bronze!!
Here’s what I’ve worked on the past 3 nights:
It isn’t necessarily an ‘app’, but a visualization tool to do a quick analysis on test scores in D.C.’s public schools. Also, you can toggle between various school levels to see if any patterns emerge whether geographically or by the neighborhood’s poverty rate. I have plans to keep Achieve D.C. an ongoing project and to also use it as a learning experience for something bigger and better.. everyone will need to be patient.
From Wikipedia to Google Mashup
by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on October 16, 2008 • google maps: scraping • COMMENTA thorough step-by-step tutorial on data scraping Wikipedia and displaying them on Google Maps:
Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets
It ties in beautifully what’s been readily available on the web for a while now – a simple ImportHtml function on Google Spreadsheets, subscribing to an RSS feed of the Wikipedia data, Yahoo Pipes to read and geocode the data and spit out as a KML file, then importing the KML into Google Maps.
What this results in is a live update of your Google Map based on changes being made on Wikipedia! It’s the first example of this kind that I’ve seen and there are still some potential pitfalls to this method.
Relying on so many sources to always be up and running is a concern (ok, so maybe I have never seen Wikipedia, Google, or Yahoo be ‘down’ but you get the idea). One goes down, and your map is broken. Or perhaps the Wikipedia table changes its structure or is moved to a separate page. Your map is once again gone.
With that said, there’s still something brewing here with data scraping and the connectivity seen in the above example. Can this method be used one day to support the geoweb?
Props to Veloroutes
by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on September 8, 2008 • google maps: mashup vacation veloroutes • COMMENTFinally I have a bike ride good enough for veloroutes.org. 159.1 miles through the Adirondacks in the blazing sun!
Veloroutes is constantly being updated with new features, not to mention all the bike routes everyone’s been submitting so it’s worth checking out if you haven’t already. Little ol’ Lancaster, PA, even has over 40 routes.
My favorite feature still has to be the elevation profile it provides along with all the calculated data — total distance, total gain, max % grade, etc.
Check out the first hill we walked biked up.
