The Guardian and The New York Times are both regular users of Google Maps. It is interesting how each of these two news organisation take a different approach to their use of the Google Maps API.
New York Times' New York City Homicides Map
Whilst The Times, under the guidance of graphics editor Matthew Bloch, usually produce stunningly designed data visualisations The Guardian tend to produce more simple maps with the emphasise on open data.
Many of The Guardian's Google Maps are released as part of the paper's Data Store. The Data Store is part of The Guardian's mission to "make data truly free". The Guardian's aim is to publish the raw statistics behind the news and make it easy to export the data.
The Guardian's Wikileaks Data Journalism Map
The Guardian therefore often produce Google Maps using Google Fusion Tables. These maps tend therefore to be a simple representation of the data with the emphasise that other developers are free to download the data and create their own visualisations.
Wandering of the Geomagnetic Poles
The Earth's magnetic poles are known to migrate over time. In fact the North Magnetic Pole has been observed to move up to 40 km in a year.
The National Geophysical Data Center has used Google Maps to trace the movement of the magnetic dip poles from 1590 to 2010. The map is based on four centuries of historical records including ship log data.
Each pole includes a marker to show the position of the dip poles at the turn of each century (1600, 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2000).
Britain's Best Budget Restaurants
The Guardian newspaper has created a Google Map of the best budget restaurants in the UK. The map shows the locations of the restaurants featured in the paper's 'Britain's Best Budget Eats' column in the last two years.
It is possible to select a city view from a drop down menu. If you choose a city the map zooms to the correct location and also loads the restaurants in the map sidebar. If you click on a restaurant's marker you can read The Guardian's review and get the restaurant's address.
