One of the latest give-aways to the web world from Google is GoogleMaps, and it’s creating quite a stir. The ever-widening use of GoogleMaps on individual web sites this week spawned a story on National Public Radio that featured an interview with Mike Pegg, the creator of the GoogleMapsMania weblog that tracks the use of GoogleMaps.

Although lots of people are doing some crazy stuff with GoogleMaps right now, this phenomenon is an important one in the development of web journalism. A few news organizations have begun using GoogleMaps to tell their stories, and more will surely follow. (A map built with GoogleMaps is called a “mashup.”)

Pegg’s weblog has a good listing of some of these journalistic uses. One I found fascinating was produced by journalists at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. (The reporter for the story was Patrick Flanigan, but I could not find anyone credited with producing the map – a major oversight by the newspaper.) They mapped all of the murders that occurred in Rochester in 2005, when the city was the murder capital of New York. There was information about each of the 54 murders and often a picture of the victim. (I have never been to Rochester and have no connection with the city, but I kept clicking on the markers for several minutes.)

The problem with using GoogleMaps on a web site is that it is based in javascript, which is beyond the pale for many of us who know just enough HTML to be dangerous. The HTML solutions that have been developed so far -- the ones that I have found, at least -- are still pretty complex and unsatisfactory.

One site, however, offers some hope. That is Mapbuilder.net, developed by Andriy Bidochko. This site works as a web editor for GoogleMaps. That is, it allows you to create a GoogleMap to your liking, while in the background it is writing the javascript code that you can then copy and paste into your own web site.

To make all of this work, you need to register your site with GoogleMaps and obtain a key – a long string of letters and numbers that will allow the map to be placed on your site. (Copy that key into a word processing document, and put it somewhere you can find it easily.) You also need to register with Mapbuilder.net, and you are set to go. You can then zero in on a location and start building your map. The copy and pasting process with Mapbuilder’s code is simple enough, and if you know what you are doing, you can change the code to customize the map and its balloons to your taste. Mapbuilder.net will store your map on its site if you do not have one of your own.

I am currently working on a map about my undergraduate years at the University of Tennessee (1966-1970), and I hope to have some of the work on JPROF.com this weekend. One of the good things about Mapbuilder.net is that it will store your maps and you can continue to add to them (or delete from them) whenever you like.

One of the reasons I am doing this map is to learn the process so I can teach it to my web journalism students at Emory & Henry (syllabus for the course) this fall. I hope to produce a tutorial on all of this very soon.

Jim Stovall (Posted Jan. 14, 2006)