Monday, August 18, 2008

Create Your Own Feed Maps

Feed Maps
screen shot of Feed Maps
Feed Maps is a new API from Map Channels that lets users create Google Maps mash-ups from a number of different data sources. The data sources that can be combined in one map are; KML files, GeoRSS, My Maps, Tab-delimited text and Google Spreadsheets.

Being able to combine geographical data from a number of different sources is a great idea and the API is very easy to use. I cut and pasted one of the example maps from Feed Maps and in a matter of seconds changed the addresses of the My Map feeds to three New York My Maps that I found on Google Maps. So in about ten minutes I was able to create my own New York Video & Restaurant Map.

Feed Maps has produced a number of its own example maps created using the API:

Tutorial 1 - Simple Map of London with preset bounds and no feeds
Tutorial 2 - Silicon Valley Historic Tour
Tutorial 3 - Silicon Valley Historic Tour, with Street View added
Tutorial 4 - London Landmarks from a Google Spreadsheet
Tutorial 5 - Interesting Street Views from a Google Spreadsheet
Tutorial 6 - Portland Farmers Market Vendors, using marker and description filters
Tutorial 7 - Miami Hotels (using paging to display a large number of places)
Tutorial 8 - London For Free, combining multiple KML feeds
Tutorial 9 - Interesting Street Views using Google Earth

If you interested in using the API Mapperz has a good post today discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using each data source.

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