Regifting with Google Maps

Gift A Stranger

Here is the perfect application to get rid of all those unwanted Christmas presents and to partake in a random of act of kindness at the same time. Gift A Stranger uses Google Maps to produce a random address that you can then use to send a gift.

To send a gift to a random stranger simply click 'send gift'. Gift a Stranger then gives you a random address somewhere in the world that you can then use to send your gift.

You can also browse the map to view the locations of gifts sent by other users. If you click on any of the map markers the map zooms to the chosen location and displays a picture of the gift that was sent to this location.

911 on Google Maps

Incident1

Incident1 uses Google Maps to plot police, fire, and emergency incidents from around the nation. The map shows the most recent incidents for your area.

Incident1 shows data from multiple agencies on one map, and it lets you search by zip code and region.

Gothamist NYC Incident Map

The Gothamist uses Google Maps to plot the locations of crimes, fires, accidents and other incidents in New York City. Think of it as police scanner chat.. mapped. Map pins include police, fire and 'exclamation point signs'.

IncidentLog

If you live in New England you can view the latest New England incidents on this Google Map. You can search the map by state, city or street name.

Seattle 911 Calls

This site uses live data publicly available on the Seattle Fire Dept. web site to show Seattle 911 calls live on Google Maps.

Fire Incident Map
The City of Nanaimo have integrated their Fire Incident Report with Google Maps. This allows the citizens of Nanaimo (or anyone else) to query the city’s Fire Incident Report and see the results on a map. The map shows the location of incidents and the apparatus that the fire deployment deployed.

________________

OpenTripPlanner Portland

A trip planner with a difference

"A trip planner helps you figure out how best to get where you want to go. A multi-modal trip planner lets you plan routes using multiple "modes," for example, on foot, bike, train, bus, or some combination thereof. A good multi-modal trip planner allows you to easily tailor your trip to your preferences, for example by eliminating transfers, walking a more scenic path, or only riding buses with bike storage."

What is OpenTripPlanner?

OpenTripPlanner is an open source multi-modal trip planner. It brings together work from a number of existing open source projects, including Graphserver, OneBusAway, and FivePoints, and aims to be easy-to-use, flexible, reliable, and fast.


Planning a trip is very straightforward - right click to create start point and right click to add destination.

Lots of Options - like Transit only - with changes includes - clearly laid-out.


For Developers

• Plans true multi-modal trips combining walking, biking and transit
• Plans wheelchair accessible trips
• Plans depart by/arrive by trips
• Takes road type, bike lane, and elevation data into account when planning bike trips
• Show elevation maps for bike trips
• Imports data from GTFS, shapefiles, OpenStreetMap, and the National Elevation Dataset
• Plans trips in about 100ms in a moderate sized city
• Exposes a RESTful API (XML and JSON), which other apps or front-ends can build on

Try the OpenTripPlanner for Portland
http://maps5.trimet.org/otp/

wiki for developers
http://opentripplanner.org/wiki

More great models from Andy Dell

Back in August, we showed you some of the great 3D models that Andy Dell was creating in Hounslow, and more recently we showed you some of the great 3D models found on the grounds of the Hampton Court Palace in London.

As it turns out, Andy has been building a lot of other models in that same area of London. The models aren't yet in Google Earth, but they're all available in the 3D Warehouse. As you can see below, the buildings look excellent and are very well built.

Here's some of what he has been working on:

Hampton Court Main Gates -- 3D Warehouse -- KML

Bushy Park Entrance -- 3D Warehouse -- KML

King Arms Hotel -- 3D Warehouse -- KML

Liongate Hotel -- 3D Warehouse -- KML

Along with those models, he's done a good bit of work in nearby Thorpe Park. He's built a variety of buildings in the park:

And even some of the rides!

You can view all of those items in this collection in the 3D Warehouse.

Great work, Andy!

George Clooney's Eye on Sudan

Satellite Sentinel Project

A joint project by the U.N.'s Operational Satellite Applications Programme, Harvard University and the Enough Project hopes to stop the tensions between South and North Sudan developing into war.

Inspired by an idea by George Clooney and John Prendergast the project is buying satellite imagery to monitor troop movements in the region. George Clooney says that using satellite imagery,

"We can witness in near real-time and put all parties on notice that if they commit war crimes, we will all be watching, and pressuring policymakers to take action."

The Satellite Sentinel Project has developed a mapping system which will combine satellite imagery analysis and field reports with Google Maps to help deter the resumption of war between North and South Sudan.

________________

Defeating Snowmageddon with Google Maps

Mapping the Storm Clean-up

New York radio station WNYC has created a Google Map for listeners to share whether their streets have been snow ploughed or not. The resulting map shows at a glance which streets have been ploughed and which are still unploughed.

The purple map markers indicate streets and neighborhoods that have been ploughed and the white markers show roads still covered by snow. You can contribute to the information displayed on the map by texting PLOW to 30644.

Snowmageddon Cleanup - New York

Ryan Ozimek, of PICnet, has used the crowdsourcing mapping tool Ushahidi to create two maps to help clean-up after the US snow storms.

Snowmageddon Cleanup - New York and Snowmageddon Cleanup - Bostonboth allow anyone to report problems, offer help or find help to problems created by the recent snow.

So if you willing to help your fellow neighbor dig out a car, shovel a sidewalk or salt a driveway you can advertise your services on these Google Maps. Conversely if you need a little help with your snow clean-up you can ask for your neigbors' help but adding a report to the relevant map.

Via: ReadWriteWeb

________________

Instant Street View Postcards

ShowMyStreet

This handy Google Maps application is just what you need if you want to share the Street View image of a location with your friends.

ShowMyStreet uses instant search to portray the Street View of a typed location. Like Google's Instant Search ShowMyStreet predicts as you type to show you the Street View of the current best guess. For example, if you want the Street View of Mission Street in San Francisco, the suggested locations go through a few permutations (e.g. Mission Viejo) until ShowMyStreet guesses correctly at 'Mission S'.

Once you have the correct Street View you can then share the location via Twitter and Facebook or e-mail the short URL. If a Street View isn't available for your current location you can share the satellite image of the location instead.

I can see myself using this map quite a bit from my mobile phone to share the Street View of my current location with friends.

Also See

Google Maps - From 0 to Instant - a Google Map with instant search.

View Facebook Checkins with Google Maps

CheckinSpy

CheckinSpy lets you view your friends Facebook check-ins on Google Maps.

The application allows Facebook users to view their own check-ins and those made by their Facebook friends directly on a Google Map. You can select to view your own check-ins from the menu bar at the top of the map. Alternatively you can view all your friends or select an individual friend's check-ins.

All recent check-ins are displayed on the map with orange map markers. If you click on the marker you can view the date of the check-in and view the location with Street View.

Simulate Forest Fires with Google Maps

ForeFire

The French national research agency CNRS have used Google Maps to create an impressive forest fire simulator.

Using the simulator it is possible to select a location on the map as the centre of the fire simulation. Before running the simulator you can also adjust the wind speed and direction. The simulation itself takes lots of data into account, including fuel, roads and elevation.

Currently the data is only available for Corsica so the simulator will only work properly on this Mediterranean island.

Via: Google Earth Blog

Fixing incorrect information in Google Earth

We get a lot of emails from users that would like to report incorrect information. Perhaps a misspelled road name, incorrect building name, etc.

Fortunately, Google makes it very easy to report problems like that. You can read all of your options on this help page, but in most cases you'll simply want to use the "Report a Problem"link in Google Maps. The item will usually be corrected in Google Maps within a month, and then corrected in Google Earth at some point after that.

Here's a brief video showing how it works:

Have you ever reported a problem using this tool? I've submitted a handful from my town, and all were resolved within a few weeks.