The Google Geo Developer Seminar Series

In my continued fit of Google Mapmania, I set out in search of more information on what I could do with Google Maps. I immediately signed up to two official Google blogs, Google Lat-Long Blog and the Google Maps API Blog. I'm not sure why there are two blogs I presume the latter is aimed more at developers than the former.

Any way it was from one of these blogs I noticed the upcoming seminar series entitled The Google Geo Developer Series. It sounded like just the thing to get me on my way and satisfy my curiosity on exactly what can we get Google Maps to do. The first workshop was entitled Quick & Dirty KML Creation (and is embedded below).


Or watch it on YouTube.com here.

A fairly simple topic to start, but it promises to take us deeper as the series goes on. Despite the simple subject matter to start Ed Parsons is right when he said in his own blog...

Almost everybody will learn something from watching this, from newcomers to the geoweb to the experts out there !

I thought the Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0 looked particularly useful tool, and I'm looking forward to the next installment entitled Creating Custom Maps which should be on YouTube in the next couple of days. Keep tabs on the future weekly seminars here on the youtube Google Geo Developer playlist here.

The Data Monkey Becomes A Neogeographer

Last week without evening realising it I took my first tentative steps to becoming a neogeographer. I didn't even know the term at the time, I heard the term coined for the first time two days later at a GIS seminar I attended (but more about that in a later post).


My Wedding Map: My first contribution to Neogeography:  View Larger Map

So what is a neo-geographer and how did I go about becoming one? Well there are a couple of fairly dry definitions of neogeography from Wikipedia and the Platial blog. But basically you become a neogeographer once you find an application out on the web and use it to start adding and sharing some information that you geo-reference (link to a location be that a point, line or polygon on a map).

I became a neogeographer when I dived into Google maps while I was logged in to my Googlemail account and I noticed for the first time the My Maps tab. I was looking for a way to mark on some locations on a map to email them to some relatives. I knew this was possible on Google Earth, which is a great tool but not something that you necessarily want to ask your retired aunt to download just to view your map. I was vaguely aware that it was now possible to do it easily on Google maps too.

In fact I was already aware that it was possible to add your own content on top of Google Maps. I had used Google Maps within a website I worked on 6-12 months ago where I used some quick and dirty javascript code to geo-reference a catalogue of publications (you can view the result here). But I was amazed to see that now 6 months or so on it was possible to create something very similar in a manor anyone could do, (even my retired aunt), and share the results with the world!

So I studiously spent 20 minutes creating my first little bit of neogeography before collecting the email link and sending it off to my relatives. You can view the Data Monkeys first bit of neogeography above...

The map shows some important locations involved in my wedding later this year, a rather boring subject if your not invited, I know. But my first little bit of neogeography all the same, and just in case you are wondering I will be adding more data to it as the date draws nearer....

Well done Google for creating such a cool tool!