A Google Maps Hangover Cure

HMSG Spiral Map

You might want to save this sound map for tomorrow when you are a little hungover. The Hudson Mohawk Sound Gate Spiral Map is a virtual walk around the Capital District of New York featuring sound and video. And it could just be the perfect ambient mood shift that you will need after your exertions tonight on New Year's Eve.

For the project one minute videos and sound recordings were made at a number of locations. Each recording is synced to the relevant location on a Google Map. Once the application has loaded all you need to do is press play. You can then sit back and watch and listen as you are taken on a spiral path through New York's Capital District.

Sublime!

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New Year's Mashups on Google Maps

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Map Clock
Use this Google Map to find out whereabouts in the world it is midnight right now. This ingenious Google Map has an embedded clock that changes to show the time in the current map view.

The map sidebar includes some quick links to find the time in cities around the world.

World Webcams
Times Square Live Streaming Cam
This live streaming webcam of Times Square has a lot of different views, so you should catch all of the midnight action.

Nasdaq Times Square Live Streaming Cam (Windows Media Player link)
This live streaming webcam is centred on the Nasdaq Market Site Tower on Times Square.

Sydney Harbour Bridge
This live streaming cam of Sydney Harbour should catch the Sydney Harbour Bridge fireworks.

Grand Place, Brussels Live Streaming Cam
This streaming webcam has a great view of the Grand Place in Brussels.

Google Maps Mashups to help you ring in the New Year:

• World Weather
• World Sunrise Times & World Times
  
• World Daylight Map
• World Webcams
• New York City webcams
• Taxi Fare Calculator (US/Canada)
• Stay Up Maps (US)
• World Live Music Map
• World Transit Mashups

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Google Earth Flight Simulator

GE Flight Simulator (0.4)

GE Flight Simulator is a very realistic flight simulation game that uses the Google Earth plugin.

Using the simulation you can fly anywhere in the world. The simulation uses Google Maps to display and help you navigate to over 30,000 airports around the world. To view the map in flight just click the "show map" button in the option bar.

If you click on any of the displayed airports you can choose to fly from or fly to the selected airport. In "Aeronautical" mode, the map also shows a layer of airspace areas. This overlay has been generated using DAFIF data.

You can also view the map of the 30,000 airports on its own here.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.