Rosie and I are embarking on a roadtrip tomorrow after I get off work. We’ll be driving down to New Orleans, Louisiana and back between Dec. 30, 2010 and Jan. 8, 2011. Our trajectory will look something like this, starting in Springfield, MA and headed to:

→ My parents’ [...]]]>

OK, here’s the experiment.

Rosie and I are embarking on a roadtrip tomorrow after I get off work. We’ll be driving down to New Orleans, Louisiana and back between Dec. 30, 2010 and Jan. 8, 2011. Our trajectory will look something like this, starting in Springfield, MA and headed to:

→ My parents’ house in Haskell, NJ for the night
→ Knoxville, TN for New Year’s eve
→ New Orelans, LA for about a week
→ Roanoke, VA on the way back, finally arriving in
→ Amherst, MA on Jan. 8, 2011.

Using iMapFlickr, I should be able to keep you posted on my whereabouts by uploading photos to the Flickr set called “Roadtrip.” — provided I keep it updated and geotag the photos.

As of this writing, there’s a pretty boring picture of the parking lot at work that I took this morning. Hopefully, as of 4 p.m. tomorrow I’ll be adding more interesting stuff. Keep in mind I can’t exactly upload photos from my DSLR while on the road (get on that, science), so updates will probably be from the hotel in the evening.

Or, I could actually go off the grid for my vacation and wait to assemble a slideshow when I come back, old school. We’ll see.

The folks over at MassLive have a pretty cool user-generated map of snowfall in the Pioneer Valley going on as I write this post, allowing local residents to post their observations about weather conditions on an embedded Google map.

I hopped on to post my own findings [...]]]>

The folks over at MassLive have a pretty cool user-generated map of snowfall in the Pioneer Valley going on as I write this post, allowing local residents to post their observations about weather conditions on an embedded Google map.

I hopped on to post my own findings when I ventured six feet out my front door to take a measurement. A paltry two inches of slush, but enough to cancel most of the classes on campus today.

I proselytize frequently on the value of Google Maps for local news organizations, and this is a great example of how to use a map to inform and engage your community. It’s also pretty useful information, considering most weather reports are based on measurements in a select few areas of a region, whereas this map has real measurements made by real people in real time. It’s certainly not an all-inclusive weather report, but it’s a good resource to plan your regional commute by.

Being someone with no natural sense of direction or mathematical savvy, I like maps both as a navigation tool and as a tool for data visualization. I also think they’re playing an ever-increasing role in local news coverage.

Because context [...]]]> I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I really love maps.

Being someone with no natural sense of direction or mathematical savvy, I like maps both as a navigation tool and as a tool for data visualization. I also think they’re playing an ever-increasing role in local news coverage.

Because context is important, and readers of a local site should be able to scan headlines, announcements and videos by the town. And by the neighborhood. And by the street.

The utility of using a map to present information on a local site is pretty broad. You can use it to tell people about special events in their area, where to vote and how to get there.

I’ve become interested in Flickr and as I develop my photo-a-day project throughout 2010, I’ve been trying to keep up with geotagging them.
Why?

Recently, I’ve been reading up on different ways to organize text, photo and video, particularly with maps.

At The Collegian, our Arts & Living section approached me with the possibility of doing a downtown shopping guide for the Web. They asked me for input on how to present it, and I thought about a post I’d read recently that mentioned iMapFlickr, which uses the Flickr API to create customizable, embeddable photomaps.

Why not take photos of the locations, write a brief review (or link to a full review [or both]) and let readers browse shops by street?

It’s a possibility worth playing with, so I tested it out by mapping a few of my Flickr photos.

You’ll notice I haven’t traveled too much since I started storing all my photos on Flickr; it’s pretty much a jump between New York/New Jersey and western Mass. Still, it gives you an idea of how a photomap can let you visualize locations geographically.

This was really, really easy to put together. Assuming you’ve already geo-tagged your photos, you can pop in your Flickr username, choose the set that you want and, hey presto, you’ve got a map. The service allows for some minor tweaks to the color scheme, size and layout, but like most third party services, it won’t exactly match your site’s template.

There are actually quite a few map-based photo organizing applications out there, and another interesting one is Geoslideshow, though this app is in its beta stages, and I’ve just requested an invite to try it out.

I’m always looking for new ways to organize content geographically, so if you’ve heard of something that might better fit my needs, let me know.

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 [...]]]> 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.

I compiled all the data and threw it on a spreadsheet with some very basic HTML, and then, from my understanding, MassLive put it through [...]]]> Last week I helped the fine folks over at MassLive put together a map of all the fireworks displays in the Pioneer Valley on and around July 4.

I compiled all the data and threw it on a spreadsheet with some very basic HTML, and then, from my understanding, MassLive put it through a magic Internet machine and, hey presto, it’s a fireworks map.

This is what it looked like before:

And here’s the after: