A few days ago, Zack Stern from PC World shared a few tips to enhance your googling. Amongst those tips is the ‘let Google Maps Find You’ tweak. Basically, instead of zooming in your location, or typing in your default location, with this tweak, you just click a link and the location-tracking technology takes 5 seconds to spot you nice and clear.
Geo-blogger Glenn at the GIS user blog shares his new passion for the Google Phone and the Twitter apps for Android. Personally, I haven’t found an app on the market that provides a positive twittering experience, but I have a little tweak to share that combines two Android apps in a geolicious way!
First, install MyTracks, the GPS track recorder from the Google team. If you jog for example, use this app to record your track every time, and compare your performance through the Google Spreadsheets the app generates for you. Your phone just turned into a physical performance booster there
Once you got MyTracks up-and-running, install Twidroid, the twitter app for Android. If you are like me and you do not like the noise of Twitter apps, go in the settings and turn off the notifications from your friends.
Now that you have those two apps running on your phone, next time you do your jogging around the park, here is what you will do:
Record your track - Hit ’share maps with friends’ in MyTracks - Select Twidroid.
Once Google generated a map for your track, Twidroid sends it right away to your Twitter stream, notifying your followers of your performance of the day. You could be more precise in your tweet, by adding “san francisco, dolores park, jogging’ in your tweet for example, so that other tweeps jogging in the same area can find you.
I find this app combo to be super easy to use, and also a real life-changer if you have been looking to hook up with other people on Twitter around outdoors activities.
To push this combo a bit further, let’s say that you want to share this map with a friend that has a Facebook profile, but no Twitter account. No biggie. Just install the Selective Twitter Status app on Facebook. Next time you recorded a track you want to show to your Facebook friend, just send him a shout out the way I described above, and add #fb at the end of your tweet.
It’s already a well-known fact around the SEO community, but it seems there is a lengthy lobbying to be done online to change mentalities about traditional SEO. Google SEO is not just about keyword strategies, links and hyper-active blogging. Today’s shortcut for professionals is Google Maps. Google invests a lot of time and energy in geo-technologies, as it believes it is the direction the mainstream Web is heading towards, and it pushes its geo-located search results on top of its SERPs (search engine result pages).
Today, an engineer of Google Maps reminds on the Google Latlong blog that user-generated content will get blended into maps and distributed across the Google Search pages.
Some of our more regular users may have noticed that we’d been sparingly doing this for a while now, occasionally surfacing results from KML, GeoRSS, or Wikipedia we crawl from the web, along with photos and videos we think would be useful - but now we’ve opened the floodgates! From now on, you can expect to see more higher quality user-created content to show up, often intermixed with our traditional results.
In other words, just create maps, Google will find them and index your content if it thinks your content adds value to the Google geo-search experience.
Off course, here at Click2Map, we are proud to be positioned as one of the leaders in the map creation space. Anyone can sign up to our service, easily generate a massive amount of geo-located content on Google Maps, and let the magic of Google bots do the rest.
Remember, Google makes it easy for anyone to find anything, but we make it easy for Google to find you.
When using a third-party application to create Google Maps, you may be asking yourself the question: Will Google find and index my content, or will it just sit in the application’s database?
Honestly, I always thought that my data was just sitting in my application’s database, that the SEO value was weak, and I was wrong.
It turns out, if the application you use generates an xml file of your markers, then Google will spot it, slurp the content, sort it out, and index the useful data into their local center. This means, any marker you add on Click2Map is visible to the Google bots and will be indexed in the leading search engine database.
Why is this important for your mapping activities?
Obviously, when we put content online, we seek visibility. Virtually, the Google bots can scan any type of Web page and index its content (yep, even flash content). However, if your content is not properly displayed, the bots will have a hard time figuring it out, and the indexing process won’t be optimized.
However, it has been unveiled many times that a strong presence on Google Maps will boost your presence in Google’s universal SERPs. Google’s ongoing strategy heads towards geo-localization. The G1 is a perfect illustration of this ongoing effort towards serving a geo-localized experience to users.
Now once your content has been geo-localized with Click2Map, an xml file of your markers is created. It usually takes up to a few hours for Google to spot your content. Once it does, it records the withheld data, and stores it in its local central.
If the data has been filled in properly, and the content is business-oriented, then it will be used on Google Maps SERPs, and it will also power Google Search search results. There are also tricks to use some mapping tools to push your content a little further, such as map embeds.
In other words, when you upload your geodata to Click2Map, you get all the advantages of Google Maps and local business center, plus the wide array of additional products and services that we offer.
Just for the fun of playing around with Click2Map’s map creation features, I slurped in the first 90 top-rated restaurants in San Francisco, laid it down on an excel sheet, converted it into .csv, and fed it to the Click2Map’s import tool that automatically generated the 90 markers on the map.
Adena at Directions Magazine shared the Mozilla announcement that Geode is coming. Geode is a geolocation add-on for Firefox which will enable localized content. ReadWriteWeb describes it as a tool that “understands location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content” and VentureBeat explains it’s a location determination tool, built on the W3C spec, upon which developers can build.
According to Skyhook Wireless over 300 iPhone apps are location-aware as of October 3rd. According to Mobclix there are over 4,000 apps in circulation. If these numbers are correct this puts the location-aware percentage at under 10% — far, far less than I would have suspected based on my own experience. There were 5.5 location-aware apps released per day in September. The location-aware apps 61% are paid (less than the 76% found in iPhone apps as a whole according to Mobclix).
This month we’ve published a significant amount of new or updated high resolution satellite imagery for Google Earth. So if you think it is going to be easy to find the new imagery, stop and think again. You are going to have to work a little. We have put together a list of clues about where to find some of our new imagery. Here is one to get you off and running on your Google Earth tour
“The beauty of frame injection attacks is that the attacker is able to impersonate a trusted entity without needing to bypass XSS/HTML filters or even break into the target server,” Pastor explained on the GNUCitizen site.
Mike Blumenthals wrote today about the latest Google Maps scandal (for the mapping community) where spammers were eating up flower merchants ranking and contact info on Google maps, provoking huge profit losses for those businesses. Apparently, things are back to normal, or almost.
Anyhow, these days, I’m a lot into (benign) hacking, and I thought it would be interesting to list a few useful Google Maps hacks here. I’ll try to leave third-party applications on the side as much as possible to focus only on tweaks, but this is not an easy task (mostly for a non-developer like me).
The first category of hacks are video games: Developed by Japanese Katsuomi Kobayashi, Geoquake is a driving simulation game using Google Earth. It is a flash application that allows a 40 frames per seconds visualization (compared to Google Earth’s traditional 20 frames/sec). In the same type of hacks is the flight simulator, a fun way to fly over your town using the Earth plug-in. Also, as reported yesterday on Google Maps Mania’s Friday fun, another Japanese developer has created this game that plugs the Wii and Street View together to allow you to jog around your neighborhood without leaving your living room.
A Google Maps hack to keep an eye on is the Easy Google Maps hack, a project started this week during the Hack Day event, which plan is to tackle Google Maps’ lack of usability by creating a maps “player” based on the same idea of the Easy Youtube player. The project idea is really good and could be very useful, so I hope those developers will reach their goals.
A more practical hack was found on LifeHacker. The hack offers a mean to zoom way in on a map by tweaking the maps’ urls. Also found on LifeHacker is a way to make your Google Maps searches a little faster by entering your geo-location directly in the url, as follows:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1683 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA
By now, I think we all heard of the biggest drawing in the world, right? Well, this actually was a hoax, but it inspired a few people to apply this drawing technique, and others to apply this hoax technique, like BoingBoing, which developed a quick app that lets you easily draw shapes on a map (this is not a Gmaps hack, but it is worth the mention).
Recently on Click2Map, we announced a new addition to our service that enables our users to easily cluster their markers on Google Maps to make their cartographic info more easy to browse and click through. While this is the easy and mainstream way to group markers, developers can also use this Javascript hack to cluster markers. The technique is a little complicated, but it definitely fits the Gmaps hack section.
A great site that integrates Google Maps and offers a wide range of geographic services is heywhatsthat.com, developed by Michael Kosowsky. The service is so hackalicious that the creator gave a keynote speech for one of the Google TechTalks.
There are probably so many more hacks out there, but they are so hard to find that I will stop here and rely on your good will to share tips and urls to further this discussion. I couldn’t find a single hack for MyMaps, despite intensive search, and this disappoints me a little, as I am sure there could be great creative ways to use this marker creation tool.
On August 5th, the Cityfile New York Website published an article about celebrity-owned bars and restaurants in NYC. The article simply is a map (created with Click2Map). Our numbers indicate that the map (direct link here) was viewed 4 357 times, accumulated a total of 187 hours spent on the page, and generated 27 607 clicks on markers. Those numbers show a modest traffic converting into an engaged readership. How did this conversion happened?
For starters, kudos go to the author of this article who created a compelling and demanded content: “celebrity-owned bars”. Who doesn’t have a favorite star, right? The idea was bright enough to bring 4,357 people to the page. But once the author got attention, what made the engagement happen?
The conversion into 6+ clicks is due to the map format of the article. A map is a much faster way to process small bits of data in a much user-friendlier environment: Pics of stars are laid down on a map. Visually, with no reading effort, you get the gist of the story. Hover over the pics to see names of the stars (in case you don’t recognize them right away). Click on the pic to pop-up a witty description of the restaurant/bar, along with the address. In a way, it’s like reading Star magazine on a map. in a traditional text format, the article would have looked much heavier, and the snail mail address of the restaurants wouldn’t have generated a clear understanding of of each places’ location. On a map, you just cruise around, spend time on the page, and pop-up content here and there.
Something else might have facilitated the time spent on the page. I don’t know if the author made this little map navigation optimization on purpose, but you’ll notice that when the map opens, it focuses on the Lower East Side, the south of New York’s central peninsula. If you click on a marker/pic in the upper part of the map, the map automatically scrolls up to allow some room for the pop-up window. In the celebrity map for example, the more you click on pics, the more the map naturally up to unveil new markers/pics up north. The naive scientist approach that I adopt here is to say that online maps have a natural tendency to take their viewers north.
This map is almost turning in a case study here at Click2Map because it gathers 3 fundamental facts:
1. A popular article can be a map.
2. Maps create engagement on the site.
3. There are ways to optimize maps to enhance the navigation experience.
Yesterday I received an e-mail asking for a blog post on a data company in exchange for a data file.
She goes on to conclude that not all the geo-entrepreneurs are doing Web 2.0 stuff. Indeed, the trade of a data file for a blog post is rather original. I’ve asked the author what kind of data file is actually worth a blog post and am waiting for the response. This is interesting in terms of online PR. Generally, a lot of companies are having a hard time finding incentives to create a buzz around their brand. In this case, it shows that in the blogosphere of GIS and online maps, since a lot of the top bloggers are primarily geo-professionals sharing their work experiences, it makes sense to barter business assets for a small share-of-voice on a popular site.
Update: Adena Schutzberg kindly responded saying: “It was a ZIP Code point file for the U.S. Some searching should find the company if you want to take him up on the deal. I would encourage any blogger who does to disclose the transaction.” Thanks Adena.
The other article that caught my attention was found on the GoogleMapsMania blog. In this post, Word Magazine Album Covers Map, Keir Clarke reviews the rock magazine’s new feature where visitors can find where the picture of their favorite albums was taken.
It seriously is a very interesting concept. First aren’t you curious to know where this picture was taken? It’s a real hotel in… Or how about this one below?
This Music Map feature is not only entertaining, I think it puts the finger on a great unexplored online marketing outlet for musicians. As I mentioned in a previous post, being a professional musician implies being on the road and sometimes exploring the strangest places. Those traveling experiences automatically become part of the stories told in songs. In other words, online map marketing makes a lot of sense for musicians as this new emerging media has the power to make you travel as far as a song has.
As Darren Herman states in a recent post, “widget” is one of the dominant buzzword of 2008. As the Web turned into a shattered media environment, the portable and sourceable nature of widgets made it a must-have for marketers, advertisers, and distributed service providers. That it be for your Myspace profile or for your blog, there are so many types of widgets available out there that, just like Facebook Apps, end-users are now less compulsive about those flashy little objects. The market is reaching a point where the supply overwhelms the demand, therefore a tougher competition between widget providers is getting off the ground.
So what makes a good, competitive widget? To answer this question, I turned to widget-expert Lawrence Coburn, Co-Founder and CEO of RateItAll, publisher of the Sexy Widget blog, and early-adopter of widgets (RateItAll was the first Web company to offer distributed rating widgets). Here is Lawrence’s answer:
I typically look for three things in a widget: 1) Fresh content; 2) Fast load times; 3) Easy share-a-bility. In my experience, the best widgets are those that are constantly showing new and interesting data, don’t slow down the host site, and do their best to enable the easy republishing of the widget elsewhere.
Obviously, if a widget doesn’t show fresh content, there is no point in using a widget. An iFrame with a static page src’d would do. The fast loading aspect of widgets is crucial on the end-user side of things: if retrieving information for a widget takes up too much time in the page loading process, site/profile publishers will get rid of the widget to gain in accessibility. Regarding share-a-bility, I think there are two dimensions implied there. First is the embed code that makes grabbing and placing a widget a breeze. Second is the customization features that enable site/profile publishers to adapt the widget to the look & feel of their sites.
To diversify the ideas brought in this article, I also asked Daniel Ha, Co-Founder and CEO of Disqus (Disqus is a commenting system that offers different widgets to make commenting more engaging). Here is Daniel’s take on this question:
A good widget needs to meet just a few points that immediately come to mind: a) easy to install, b) immediately useful, c) customizable, d) reliable and fast. Because widgets are usually low-barrier applications, they should be simple to install and its benefit should be recognizable from the beginning (you shouldn’t need to wait for network effects). Being customizable and reliable/fast is important because widgets are applications that are distributed across websites, but still need to feel like they’re native.
Daniel and Lawrence seem to agree a lot on the positive characteristics of a widget. “Easy to install and customizable” are synonymous to share-a-bility. “Reliable and fast” means fast loading time. Daniel also mentions “immediately useful”. That is a very good point, probably the most important now that widget consumers are getting pickier by the minute: “Will visitors interact with it/Will I benefit from this interaction?”
If we are so interested in widgets here at Click2Map, it is for the simple reason that we are developing a widget to make sharing Google Maps a fuller experience. Even though Google is doing an awesome job at bringing online maps to the masses, the sharing features are still a little limited. Our goal is to enable our users to benefit from our unique features from creation to distribution.
To follow on the great ideas shared by Lawrence and Daniel above, I would add - at least in Click2Map’s case - that a good widget creates loyalty. Maps are a way to localize places/people on a map through markers. GeoRSS enable subscribers to be automatically informed of new markers’ creation. If a widget is visually attractive, offers useful information in the context of the site it is embedded in, and enables to create a long-lasting tie through RSS-like technologies (similar to subscribing to comments in a post), then the benefits for the site/profile publisher are worth the awful sweat of copy/pasting the widget’s embed code.
