Google Mash-ups

by Liz Cruz-Kaegi

Did you know that in 2004 McDonalds opened 36.2 new restaurants for every million people in the U.S, 2.9 in South America and 1.0 in the Middle East?

No, this is not the beginning of a Trivial Pursuit game, it is just a bit of information I found at an interesting site called Worldmapper.

As a researcher I am constantly looking for ways to present information to my busy clients in an easy to grasp format. I have found that information is more useful and better understood when compared to something.
That is why I think maps are so fascinating. They offer new insights and make a difficult concept easy to understand.

The web has made maps part of our everyday life, most of us, start our trips with a search engine map or a GPS in our hands or waste a few minutes every now and then traveling with Google Earth.

But what if we could use those maps for something more than finding an address? For example overlying a list of our clients address on a Google map will let us see which areas we have penetrated with our products or services and allow us to plan future expansions, or target advertising campaigns. That is exactly what Google mash-ups let us do and with a new service
called My Maps, Google has made it easy even for someone with no coding experience to add layers of data to maps.

I decided to try just that the other day. I grabbed the Forbes list of best small companies and created a Google mash-up for the Philadelphia region (click here to see map). Some facts that jumped at me immediately was that none of the companies were located in Delaware, there were only two companies in South Jersey and most of the companies were located in Northern New Jersey.

People have been creating thousands of those Google mash-ups. Here are a few of my favorites:

Find a world port, provide maps, satellite image and contact information of ports in 181 countries, housing maps, gives you houses for sale and rent as posted in Craig list Google-Yahoo Traffic Weather Map, gives you current traffic
information in your area, Whoissick let you see how many people are sick in your neighborhood and if you are planning to market your services to Martians any time soon this mash-up of UFO sightings could be quite useful.

You can find more mash-ups at Google Mania Maps Blog and Programmableweb and if you decide to create your own, go to My
Maps in Google and let me know. I would love to see them.

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