The NYT Examines the Destruction in Haiti

Destruction in Haiti, Then and Now

The New York Times has created an eye-opening interactive feature using aerial photos from GeoEye and Google Maps to show Port-au-Prince before and after the earthquake in Haiti last January.

Using the application is it is possible to view aerial imagery from both before and after the earthquake. The imagery includes shots of the tent cities that were created after the quake as well as highlighting some of the damaged structures in the city.

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Google Maps of the Australian Floods

The tragedy of the flooding in Australia seems to just keep getting worse and worse. Flash floods in the Brisbane area have left nine dead and at least 70 missing nearby.


All Things Spatial map of the Australian floods

Arek, of Australian mapping blog All Things Spatial, has written a great post about how the government is often slow to respond to such crisis with GIS projects.

Because governments are often slow to respond community lead projects in the GIS arena are a great solution. For example, ABC has just released the ABC Qld Flood Crisis Map, built on the Ushahidi platform.


ABC Qld Flood Crisis Map

The map is an attempt to crowdsource reports on the Queensland floods and the recovery operations. The Ushahidi platform is especially useful as it can be configured to send SMS alerts to registered users.

Arek also points to the Australian Early Warning Network that republishes Bureau of Meteorology information and sends emergency alerts to mobile phones, home phones, pagers and via SMS or e-mail. The Australian Early Warning Network is maintained by a private company.

Arek has himself produced a Google Map to show the huge extent of the area affected by the flooding.

You can donate to the Flood Relief Appeal here.

Via: All Things Spatial

How to Find Mambo Juice in LA

Food Truck Maps

Google Maps showing the location of food trucks is definitely a growing trend in the USA, especially in LA. The latest application is Food Truck Maps which is tracking 104 food trucks in Los Angeles.

As well as the Google Map showing the location of the food trucks Food Truck Maps also shows the latest tweets from the trucks. You can search the tweets by category and location.

Also See

• Tweat It - Google Map of food vendors in New York
• truXmap - real-time location map of food trucks in Los Angeles
• Bistro Chaser - tracking food trucks in LA

Google Maps in the News

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.

Google Map of the Migrating Magnetic Poles

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).

Budget Eats Google Map

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.

Sunday Best

The Sunday Best is the weekly round-up of the most interesting Google Maps that caught my eye this week.

Floxx

UK start-up Floxx is using Google Maps to map hot people seen by users. Rumours say that a number of UK universities are trying to ban it from their campuses.

Bonne Annee 2011

Digitas France use Custom Street View Panoramas to create their own interactive Street View New Year's Eve card.

BOOMsys

BOOMsys has an interesting calendar UI for its Google Maps animation of IED's in Iraq.

Google Shared Spaces

The most retweeted post on Google Maps Mania this week was a small round-up of Google Maps available in Google Shared Spaces. TravelWithMe, a collaborative trip planning map, is probably the most impressive.

PlantMaps

This Google Map displays the current USDA plant zone hardiness zones. Hardiness zones are helpful in deciding which trees and plants will survive in a particular area.

10 Great Car Journeys in Street View

This week the Jalopnik website used TripGeo to create an animated Street View drive of the Dalton Highway in Alaska.

TripGeo is a great widget that lets you create embeddable animated Street View journeys anywhere that Google Maps has Street View coverage. Inspired by Jalopnik, here are my ten favourite Street View journeys animated by TripGeo:

Dalton Highway, Alaska


Transfagarasan Highway

The Transfăgărăşan is the most dramatic and second-highest paved road in Romania. The 90 km of twists and turns run north to south across the tallest sections of the Southern Carpathians, between the highest peak in the country, Moldoveanu, and the second highest, Negoiu.

Chapmans Peak, South Africa


Chateau d'Eox , Switzerland


Kirkstone Pass, UK

Kirkstone Pass is a mountain pass in the English Lake District, in the county of Cumbria. This is the Lake District's highest pass that is open to motor traffic.

Millau Viaduct, France

The Millau Viaduct is a cable-stayed road-bridge that spans the valley of the river Tarn near Millau in southern France. It is the tallest bridge in the world,

Highway 1, California


Lake Como, Italy


Øresund Bridge, Denmark to Sweden

The Øresund Bridge connects Sweden and Denmark, and it is the longest road and rail bridge in Europe.

Stuart Highway, Australia

tThe Stuart Highway is one of Australia's major highways. It is the principal north-south route through the central interior of mainland Australia and is often referred to simply as "The Track".

Google StreetView Broke the Law, Say South Korean Police

Slashdot just started a discussion on a story named Google Broke the Law, Say South Korean Police.

Their summary: "South Korean police say Google was in violation of Internet privacy laws when its Street View service archived private information in more than 30 countries, including email and text messages. The country's Cyber Terror Response Center broke the encryption on hard drives raided from Google last August and confirmed that private information had been gathered, violating South Korea's telecommunications laws. Police are seeking the original author of the program, though they say it is likely to be a US citizen. Google said it stopped collecting the information as soon as it realized what was happening. 40 states in the US are demanding access to the information gathered by the mapping service in order to determine what was archived, which Google refused to hand over. 'We have been cooperating with the Korean Communications Commission and the police, and will continue to do so,' said a Google Korea spokesperson."

Friday Geonews: FacilMap.org, NOAA Bathymetry Viewer, ESRI's GeoDesign, Australia Flood Maps, GLONASS Phones, and more

Here's the Friday geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / open data front:

• A third entry in the series of the Free Shapefiles of Countries of the World, focusing this time on small countries
• Mapperz mentions FacilMap.org Beta, that aims to group together layers of various OpenStreetMap projects
• An entry on OpenPisteMap, for mountain sports
• Via Kurt, here's NOAA's new bathymetry data viewer
• There's a new offline editing plugin for QGIS
• GeoNetwork opensource v2.6.2 released
• Shapely 1.2.8 has been released

From the ESRI front:

• SS summarizes Jack Dangermond's opening talk at the GeoDesign Summitand shares a second entry named Exploring the Esri Approach to GeoDesign
• James praises for Python in ArcGIS

In the miscellaneous category:

• There has been quite a few entries on the Australian flood maps, the best one I found is from VerySpatial
• Here's the Top 10 Spatial Law and Policy Stories of 2010
• Via APB, here's DigitalGlobe's Top Ten Imagery Related Events of the Decade
• APB mentions that a Japanese Company Achieves 3 cm Accuracy for GPS
• GLONASS-enabled phones are coming in March
• Here's Cédric's seven 2011 geo predictions
• Kurt mentions the Earth Observer iOS app
• SS mentions Satellite Monitoring Employed to Prevent Civil War in Sudan, supported by actor George Clooney
• Slashdot ran a story named 'French Use Space Tech To Find Parking Spots'