With Hurricane Gustav shaking the tranquility of the Gulf of Mexico, a lot of people are structuring social media tools to facilitate the flow of information in this particular area.

On Twitter, Mark Mayhew - New Orleans local and heavy-user of the Web-based SMS platform - keeps track of all signs of climate change or threat.

Journalists from the Chicago Tribune are also implied full time in reporting on the moods of Hurricane Gustav.

All big media houses are actually covering the Hurricane, using traditional online tools, like Aljazeera on Youtube.

From individuals to corporations, everyone is implied in tracking and reporting any climate changes, ready to pull the emergency alarm at any time.

Another great way to follow the Hurricane is through Live News Camera, a video hub syndicating a variety of local and national TV networks. The Website has a dedicated page, the “Hurricane Center“, where visitors can search for local TV networks on a (Click2Map) map.

The concept of Live News Camera is made possible thanks to the technology we develop here at Click2Map, which makes it really easy to explore new ideas with Google Maps. In the case of Live News Camera, the map creator created 2 groups of markers (USA TV and World TV), but each group contains close to 70 markers total, and some markers contains several tabs. Because we make data management a breeze, map creators using Click2Map have the richest detail-oriented maps online.

Thumbs up to Live News Camera for offering such an original source of info in those times of climate uncertainty!

xavierv

This week, we just released our new version of the service. The announcement was made public on Monday.

To illustrate a bit how it works, I have created a map of the places to go out in San Francisco, and made a short and punchy 1′30 video demo of how I created this map.

Grab this map:
<iframe id=”c2m_map_widget” src=”http://www.click2map.com/maps/xavierv/GoOutSF/widget” width=”700″ height=”400″ frameborder=”0″></iframe>

The first exciting new feature is to show/hide tool for groups of markers on a map. As you can see on my map, I can single out places “serving food” by hiding “bars open late night” and “clubs”. This tool can be very useful to show markers by price range, type of businesses, open hours, and so on.

In addition to this, the user can get driving directions right there on the map. How convenient to plan your night out!

Finally, I kept the sweetest fruit for dessert: Batch operation on multiple markers:

This new productivity tool lets you perform operations on multiple markers with unique ease. Bulk operations allow you to update the content of several markers in a single operation! You can thus change or delete their description, the links they contain, the keywords they hold and even their icon! It’s also possible to add tabs to each marker (text, photo or Html) or to remove existing ones. You can also move or duplicate markers across existing groups and maps and geocode them from their street address. The Platinum version also makes it possible to apply a template to several markers at the same time.

Those are great milestones that have been achieved here at Click2Map. However, we’re not done yet: A map widget is under stealth development. Click2Map already offers an embed code to insert your maps in any post, but we are working on making a super good looking one that will integrate new features, and that will look much better on any given Web page, ergonomically speaking.

Article on Google Maps Mania: Two Ways to Build Google Maps Mash-Ups
Article on HyveUp: New Features on Click2Map - Screencast Demo

Xavierv

We’re proud to announce the release of the brand new 1.7 version of Click2Map.

Among other things, published maps now allow you and your visitors to display or hide groups of markers and to choose the “terrain” display mode.

Silver, Gold and Platinum Click2Map subscriptions moreover allow you to display itineraries on published maps. These Click2Map versions have now become even more professional with the addition of a unique productivity tool allowing you to update multiple markers at once.

Be sure not to miss any of these new features! The free 30-day Trial of Click2Map is the perfect solution to discover all the possibilities available in the most advanced Click2Map versions!

Expect another release before the end of the summer: we’re working on a brand new widget that will satisfy even the most demanding users!

Display/hide markers on published maps
All the markers present in a group can easily be displayed or hidden by simply checking or not a checkbox.Clicking on the folder representing a group displays or hides the list of its contained markers.Clicking on the panel arrow (circled in red) allows you to completely hide the marker list.

Terrain mode
This new display mode is now available both in the Click2Map editor and on all generated maps.

Directions (Silver, Gold and Platinum Click2Map versions)
A new tab labeled “Directions” can now be displayed on published maps. It offers a quick way to calculate itineraries between markers or addresses. You can choose not to display this tab in the map publication dialog box.

Batch operations on multiple markers (Silver, Gold and Platinum Click2Map versions)
This new productivity tool lets you perform operations on multiple markers with unique ease. Bulk operations allow you to update the content of several markers in a single operation! You can thus change or delete their description, the links they contain, the keywords they hold and even their icon! It’s also possible to add tabs to each marker (text, photo or Html) or to remove existing ones. You can also move or duplicate markers across existing groups and maps and geocode them from their street address. The Platinum version also makes it possible to apply a template to several markers at the same time.

Feel free to send us any feedback at support (at) click2map.com!

Antony

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.

xavierv

Are SMBs confused about new online marketing strategies? A recent article on the Sf Chronicle sparked up quite a few reactions on the blogosphere. At the center of the debate is Yelp, a San Francisco-based platform for user-generated reviews of small businesses:

Last week, Yelp purged an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?

Will Scott from Website Promotion is not Voodoo thinks this situation reflects the overall confusion that most SMBs are facing with social promotion tools. For Will, times were simpler for SMBs when the major online promotion tool was YellowPages: Buy ads, get more exposure, sell more.

Today, with the new online social trends, SMBs have to push people to talk about them, and this kind of public relations is hard to handle when you are not a killer online PR pro. How do you tell your customers to spend half an hour on a website to create a profile and rate the transaction they just made at your store (something customers automatically do if the transaction went bad btw)? When it comes to reviewing a business, the incentive is small for customers, but extremely high for merchants wishing to increase their exposure. Therefore, it becomes much easier to create strategic partnerships with other merchants who profoundly understand the benefits of writing positive reviews about each other.

Greg Sterling calls this a gray area:

The reviews may be entirely legitimate in many cases. But, as the (SF Chronicle) article points out, it underscores the influence and impact of Yelp. It’s very much like Google and people trying to game or improve their ranking on Google because of how that maps directly to the bottom line.

If this is a gray area (and I agree it is), then the whole Web 2.0 is a gray area: The line between power users and system gamers is too thin. The PageRank fiasco that hit Google a few month back reflects the same problematic. Is Robert Scoble gaming the system by being omnipresent on Friendfeed? Is Friendfeed gaming the system by sucking up all of Twitter’s juice? Let’s not get too excited here…

Back to SMBs: if small merchants’ strategic alliances are not permitted, then how do you boost your online presence? What do you do if your customers are not user-generated review enthusiasts? Here at Click2Map, we are very SMBs oriented. We do not provide a solution for businesses to improve their ranking on user-generated review sites, but we surely help them build their presence on Google. How? When people search for a specific location on Google, a Google Map is the first organic result that pops up on search result pages. Here at Click2Map, we make Google Maps creation a breeze: It’s easy to upload spreadsheets of geographic data, to manage a wide number of map markers, and to publish it on the Google Maps platform. This is a valuable tool to help you optimize your natural presence on an increasingly popular medium (Google Maps). Check out Click2Map’s free version to see how easy it is to be mapped in.

Xavier Vespa
http://twitter.com/xavierv

In the last weeks, since we announced the major 1.5 release, hundreds of users reached the Click2Map community. For them and the thousands of Click2Map users, we’re very happy to add new features and tools to Click2Map.

Map duplication
You can now duplicate a map with all groups and markers. You just have to select the map in the Editor, right click and select the contextual menu “Duplicate Map…”. All the map settings like Center Address, Zoom Level, Default Marker Info or Template are also duplicated in the new map. 

Help system & FAQ
Click2Map is a Rich Internet Application (RIA). That means a lot of features and parameters that allows you to custom Maps creation and publication. Each Dialog Box contains now a Help button with a link to the appropriate Help section. Also, the new FAQ provides you answers to the more frequent asked questions

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It’s now possible to try all Click2Map features, for free and for 30 days.

Everyone now can test the advanced features like the import and export tools, the marker template, and the My Database module. You can check out the various tutorials on the wiki to get started.

You can also get statistics on your maps from your “My Account” page. You’ll find useful information about visits, visitors and the number of clicks on your markers.

Note that after 30 days, your account will automatically be changed to the free bronze plan. You can also upgrade anytime to Silver, Gold or Platinum plan.

We hope you will enjoy trying Click2Map!

Some users asked us about the URL address for the generated maps, like:
http://generator.click2map.com/maps/Steff1985/North%20America%20Parks

Why “generator”? Why not “www”? Couldn’t it be more standard with a URL address like:
http://www.click2map.com/maps/Steff1985/North%20America%20Parks?

In fact yes! So, we decided to apply this change for the maps generated as web pages or widgets.

If you have a link to your maps on your website, we can update it.

What about already generated maps?

Nothing changes! Using “generator” in the URL address of your already published map will still work.