Tom Meagher bio photo

Tom Meagher

Journalist

Twitter LinkedIn Github

Maps, maps, maps

It seems the Internet has done as much for amateur cartographers as it has for budding pornographers.

As I promised earlier, I have a few resources to share on mapping, particularly of the Google Maps variety. I had actually been planning on posting this for the last few days, when I noticed this mention the Analytic Journalism blog of Google’s new feature that allows users to embed a personal Google Map into a Web blog using just a tiny snippet of HTML. This is a feature that’s long overdue, and should make all of the hub-bub over map mash-ups all the more accessible for the average user.

I almost wish they had offered such a feature last year when I made my first Google Map. I was writing an investigative project about the city of Paterson selling off its property tax liens against vacant lots to a third-party investor. I decided to take the database I had already built, and with a little help from Excel, I was able to add the lines of code that let me dump it into a map using the Google Maps API. Without ever having worked with an API in my life–just a little bit of rudimentary HTML–I was able to learn the code and whip up the map in the span of a couple days. Most of that time was spent on the hardest part: driving around town with a laptop on my passenger’s seat and a photographer in the back taking pictures of each of the 160+ properties on the map. I thought it came out great.

Adding a Google Map to your story (or a Yahoo Map for that matter) is considerably easier than working with ArcGIS to produce the static maps you often see in the paper. And its a great Web feature that readers seem to dig. If you want to learn how to start tinkering with the API, here’s a few good starter pages:

Also, here’s a few other of my favorite recent mapping toys:

  • The Gmap Pedometer helps you find routes (and distances between destinations) as the crow walks, block by block. This is great for living in New York City. I use it to plot out my weekly bike rides across the Outer Boroughs.
  • Finally, BatchGeocode.com is a great resource that I seem to use again and again for mapping projects large and small. If you have a lot of points (more than a few hundred), it can take some time, but it’s free and it’s easy, like all good maps (and graphics in general) should be.