My most recent project for MassLive.com, a map of Halloween events in the Pioneer Valley, is now live.
This is pretty much identical to the fireworks map I helped out with this summer. I’m a big fan of the Google Maps API and what it offers news sites by way of providing geographic context for a story, or in this instance just a helpful resource for readers.
Google also makes it easy to do. Because MassLive deals with a ton of information on the day to day, their map uses a Google spreadsheet, which I packed with event names, addresses, latitude and longitude and a description formatted in basic HTML, to overlay the pertinent information on a Google map on page load. This is a process I don’t entirely understand after the spreadsheet leaves my auspices.
But for smaller, more dynamic language-friendly sites like DailyCollegian.com, the process is even easier. Take the SGA voting guide we put together for example.
Collegian assistant multimedia editor Chris Shores did a great job putting together a guide to SGA candidates based on residence areas (which are, essentially, voting districts) using anchored pages.
When I assigned the project I figured I’d have to spend a lot of time tweaking it after the fact, but it came out pretty much exactly as I wanted, so I just rounded it out with a quick map of all the polling places on campus. In this instance, it’s just a matter of creating a new map under “my maps” in Google, pinning down the exact locations, writing a description and customizing the markers. Google even lets you upload your own custom marker images, a feature I’ve yet to take advantage of.
This stuff is so easy a newspaper could do it.
Did you take any metrics on interaction? It would pretty sweet to see how many people used the maps and how they used it.
That’s a good question. As far as traffic for MassLive goes, I’m an independent contractor so I don’t have those metrics; I only get a daily report for traffic on my own blog there, but I’ll ask the powers that be.
As far as the Collegian’s usage, I don’t know. We use the basic Google Map embed feature, so that doesn’t give us any sort of reading on use. And a good question for you [and my Web guys who have the keys to our Goog analytics], I guess, would be how do you get stats from individual posts on WordPress?
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