The Mapping and Distance Tools website lets you determine the compass bearing between sets of points. Zoom in to your desired area, click on “Start A Course”, and then click on the points you want (or enter a name or address to create a point). The tool will put X’s on the points, drawing lines between them:
As you create each point, the location of each point, the distance to preceding and succeeding points, and bearing will show up in a table:
You can also draw a circle on the map, though the utility of that option escapes me. And if you want to see how it’s done, the source code is available.
Johann Blake writes about his new tool to plot geographic Google Analytics data in Google Earth or Google Maps. Just follow the instructions on the website to export the Analytics data in XML format to your computer, then upload the file to the site. You have the choice of creating either a straight KML file for Google Earth, or a direct plot of the data in Google Maps; the latter doesn’t seem to work currently in Firefox 3, but does work in Internet Explorer. You get placemarks for every country from which you had a visitor, color/type coded by the total number of visitors:
Click on a placemark in either Google Earth or Google Maps to see the number of visitors from that country. You can use the standard Google Analytics controls to select the desired time frame, and also filter data.
It appears as though you can also select geographic sub-regions in Google Analytics like the US states below. I did get a bunch of error messages in Google Maps, and the District Of Columbia plotted in the South Atlantic, before the rest of the states plotted correctly:
This older tool was able to plot individual visitors, but required a raw data export capability that Google Analytics no longer provides. So for now, Johann’s site is the best available GE/GM Analytics tool.
MapChannels writes to announce a few new features:
Holiday Maps: Create an embeddable Google Maps window with the option for additional information layers:
- Panoramio photos
- Geo-tagged Wikipedia articles
- Google Street View
- Traffic Layer
- Weather Information
- User-defined KML or GeoRSS Layers
- Index sidebar
- Hotel search using the Map Channels Hotel Directory
- Google search
- Slide Show
- Google Earth 3D (note: currently buggy, doesn’t work for me in Firefox 3)
MapChannels For Virtual Earth: Create an embeddable Virtual Earth window with KML or GeoRSS feeds (an analogue to Google Maps’ MyMaps feature, also supported by MapChannels in embeddable format).
StreetCities: New tools to combine Google’s Street View with a second view in the Google Earth plugin. This doesn’t work in Firefox 3, either.
Here’s a slick little online geographic tool called DishPointer. Enter your position (latitude/longitude), or your address, then select from a list of broadcast satellites in geosynchronous orbit. DishPointer will bring up a Google Maps display showing the proper orientation for your dish antenna for optimal reception from the selected satellite:
Check the box marked “Show obstacle”, and you can move the marker to show the maximum height an obstacle (like a tree or a neighbor’s house) can have without blocking your satellite dish’s line-of-sight view.
Click on the Google Earth icon, and have the line-of-sight to the satellite shown in 3 dimensions:
If your view of the satellite is blocked by terrain, that will be visible in Google Earth; if there are 3D buildings for your area, you’ll also be able to see whether your view is blocked by adjacent buildings as well.
Via OgleEarth.
Over a year ago, I posted on Google Map Creator, a program from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis that lets you convert shapefiles into thematic colored maps for display in Google Maps. They’ve just created a new site called MapTube , “a place to put maps”, that collects links to maps created with Google Map Creator. You can search for maps covering a particular topic or area, and select multiple thematic maps for simultaneous display, to see if any relationships are visible between different datasets. Sliders set the transparency of the various maps displayed, and you can turn the legends on and off by clicking on the legend icon in the map thumbnail:
You can also create an account that lets you add your own maps to MapTube, but you have to host the actual map data yourself on your own server; MapTube’s function will be to index the metadata, preview the maps, and allow people to view them in a Google Maps interface. The current maps are heavily Anglo-centric (not surprising), and limited in number; the site’s ultimate usefulness will depend on how many people actually wind up creating maps for it. It would help if they could add an interface to MapTube directly to the Google Map Creator program, and also if there were some way in the program to directly upload Google Map Creator maps to a centralized data server and pass that link directly to MapTube.
Google has just announced the addition of topographic contour lines to their Terrain view in Google Maps. It’s for the entire world, so I suspect they’re using SRTM 90-meter resolution data; not ideal, but not bad, either. Here’s Popocatepetl, just SE of Ciudad de Mexico:
You have to zoom in to at least the 1-mile / 2 km range for the contours to appear.
Got an email from David Rothschild, the founder of Seero.com, inviting me to take a look at his new web service for combining media content (text, pictures and video) with geographic location. This really isn’t my thing, but what I saw on their website was interesting enough for me to post briefly on it. Basically, you can create a dynamic network KML link on their site, and have it either open in Google Earth or in Google Maps. Each time you add a placemark to the dynamic link, you can embed text, photos, and links to video hosted at Seero; the video can supposedly open in the Google Earth pop-up, but on my system, it opens up in the Firefox browser. Examples include this KML link to a walking tour along the Sierra Nevada / Cascades in the Western US, and a Google Maps interface on the One Man Walking blog, where the placemarks on the map link to blog posts for that location.
There’s more, including apparently the ability to do a live webcast with streaming video, while your current location by GPS is plotted on a Google Maps interface. Like I said, not my thing, so I haven’t delved too deeply into it, but if you’re interested in creating geographic travelogues, it may be worth a look.
Now this is pretty slick! Go to this link at the MapChannels website, choose a location with the Google Maps interface, fill out a simple form, select some basic options, and get embeddable code that lets you display the same location in both Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps, side by side. Scroll/zoom one side, and the other follows automatically; you can also change the view (Map/Satellite/Terrain for Google, Road/Aerial/Hybrid/Bird’s Eye for Microsoft) independently for each side. Try it out here:
Map Channels - Free mapping tools for your website or blog
