Happy Thanksgiving!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the US, and I had planned to be up in Michigan hanging out with relatives, but we're staying home in Atlanta with a few sick little girls. Tomorrow morning I was going to run the Turkey Trot 10K in Detroit, which would have been pretty cool. You can view the route in Google Earth (KML), thanks to MapMyRun.

Instead, I'll be taking it easy and enjoying time with family, eating the big meal, and watching the Lions lose.

A few years ago, Frank created the world's largest Thanksgiving greeting card. You can check it out in Google Earth. Feel free to share the link with your friends or family. (By the way, if you look closely, you'll see a placemark with a turkey icon. Check out the placemark for a little Thanksgiving trivia.)

Google Maps Encourage Serendipity

Serendipitor

Serindipitor is an interesting iPhone app that gives you walking directions that are designed to encourage serendipitous experiences. The app combines directions generated by Google Maps with instructions for action and movement inspired by Fluxus, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono, among others.

To use the app you just need to enter a starting point and a destination. The app then maps your route with added suggestions for possible actions to take at given location. The actions are "designed to introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route".

A really cool feature of the application is that you can get directions based on the time you have available. Therefore it is possible to get walking directions not just for the quickest route but that match the time you have available.

Explore London in 3D during the Barclays ATP World Tour

During the 2010 Winter Olympics, EarthvisionZ released a very slick site to support the games -- olympicsin3d.com. It was very well done, and an excellent use of the Google Earth Plug-in.

Now, in cooperation with the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals), they've brought us "Explore London in 3D", a similar tool that helps you explore the city of London during the World Tour Finals that are happening right now.

To explore the city, simply head over the site and browse around. There are links to various points of interest (hotels, restaurants, etc), as well as direct links to view the stadium in 3D or view a current weather overlay of the city.

Bahamas Nautical Charts on Google Maps

GeoGarage Marine

Marine GeoGarage uses the Google Maps API to display about 260 nautical charts for the seas around the Bahamas, the Turks & Caicos islands, Hispaniola and the Caribbean.

The source of the charts comes from Wavey Line Publishing which has been surveying the region for many years. The charts are overlaid above the normal Google Maps tiles and a slide control allows you to adjust the transparency and compare the chart to the map tiles below.

A good example of the accuracy of the charts is the Orange Cay island, which Google Maps does not show, neither in the map view nor in satellite view.

Amsterdam Coffee Shops on Google Maps

WeedMaps

WeedMaps is a community website allowing medical marijuana patients to connect with other patients in their geographic region.

The site contains a number of Google Maps showing the location of medical marijuana dispensaries in various US cities. WeedMap also includes a Google Map of Coffee Shops in Amsterdam.

Each mapped listing includes user ratings and reviews. If you click through on the map you can view the full details of each listing including the address and opening hours.

The Price of Weed

Some enterprising supporters of the free market have developed this Google Map to track the retail price index of marijuana. In order to gauge the true street value of this globally traded product the Price of Weed has decided to crowdsource the cost of marijuana and post the results on a handy Google Map.

Currently the map only shows marijuana prices in the USA and Canada. Other countries will be added to the map once the data begins to flow in. If you click on a map marker you can view the average prices for weed in that location. You can also view the latest submission below the map.

Warning: Please remember the value of your investment in this market could go up in smoke.

Also See

Potlocator - medical marijuana dispensaries
Medical Marijuana Shopping - more medical marijuana dispensaries

Toronto Video Guide on Google Maps

My City Lives

Here is your personal video guide to the city of Toronto. My City Lives is a platform that allows people in Toronto to share their experiences of the city’s public spaces and organizations by posting videos to a Google Map.

The submitted videos are represented on the map by thumbnail images of the videos. To watch a video you just have to click its thumbnail.

It is possible to refine the videos shown on the map by 'Most Viewed', 'Food', 'Coffee', 'Date Ideas', 'Missed in Connection' and 'Nuit Blanche'. It is also possible to refine the results by a custom search.

Gothic France on Google Maps

Mapping Gothic France

Mapping Gothic France is a joint project between the Visual Media Center in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, the Visual Resources Library at Vassar College, and the Columbia University Libraries.

The project uses the Google Maps API and custom map tiles to present the locations of France's Gothic buildings. Using the map it is possible to browse the listed buildings geographically. It is also possible to view buildings by the approximate date of their construction and view historical maps of the period overlaid on the main map.

Mapping Gothic France also contains a number of essays and stories of France's Gothic buildings. The essays also use the Google Maps API to illustrate the referenced Gothic buildings.

Google Map of Tourist Attractions

RueFind

RueFind is a website that explores interesting tourist attractions around the world. The site includes a Google Maps interface to the over one thousand tourist attractions in its database.

The map shows each of the locations listed on RueFind using thumbnail images of each attraction. If you click on any of the thumbnail images you can read a description of the attraction and click through to view the attraction's main page on RueFind.

It is also possible to vote for your favourite attractions. RueFind will be publishing the results showing the best tourist attractions very soon.

Real-Time German Buses Map

Real-Time Reutlingen Buses Map

This real-time Goggle Map shows the current location of every bus in the German city of Reutlingen.

The map shows the city's bus routes with coloured polylines. The location of each bus-stop on each line is also clearly shown. The location of all buses on the network is shown in real-time with animated bus icons. If you click on any of the bus icons you can receive information about the bus' number and its current destination.

In the future the developer plans to add a real-time traffic overlay and live tracking of regional trains.

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Fusion Tables

Spatial Queries

The spatial queries that were recently added to Fusion Tables mean that it is now very easy to create a very powerful Store Locator using just Google Maps and Fusion Tables. If you have a Fusion Table that contains your store data you can easily create a Google Map that will load the stores within a defined area or load the nearest stores to a given location.

Using the bounding box spatial query you can load points within a predefined area. You can also use the 'distance' query to load the stores nearest to a given point.

Load Nearest Points

We can use the getCenter function to get the latitude and longitude at the centre of the map. It is then possible to load the nearest points of interest in our Fusion Table to this point. The following function will load the ten nearest points to the current centre of the map.

function loadNearest() {
layer.setQuery("SELECT Country FROM 188044 ORDER BY ST_DISTANCE(Country, LATLNG( " + map.getCenter().lat() +', '+ map.getCenter().lng() + ")) LIMIT 10");
}

We can then add a button to the map to call the function with

onclick="loadNearest()"

Bounding Box

It is now also possible to easily create a bounding box with Fusion Tables. Using a bounding box we can define an area on the map and load in all the points from a Fusion Table that fall within that area.

function boundingBox() {
layer.setQuery("SELECT Country FROM 188044 WHERE ST_INTERSECTS(Country, RECTANGLE(LATLNG(35.77, -12.57), LATLNG(66.6, 37.3)))");
}

We can add a button to the map to call the bounding box with:

onclick="boundingBox()"

This Spatial Queries demo shows the bounding box in action. To add the 'ditance' query just add the code I have outlined above.