Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

Mapping (on) the Web

Hacks 35–46

We’re all pilgrims on the same journey—but

some pilgrims have better road maps.

—Nelson DeMille

A plague upon it! I have forgot the map.

—Hotspur, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, III:1

It may be a small world, but the Web is a big scary place. Search-engine pro-

viders are looking for new ways to provide “relevant” content; weblog writ-

ers are looking for new ways to connect with audiences “near” to them.

“Mapping (on) the Web” illustrates simple techniques for spatializing web

content and producing interesting geographic visualizations of web-found

things, making the most of existing web mapping services.

Commercial web mapping services, while being careful to exercise their per-

ceived intellectual property rights, gain a lot from allowing people to anno-

tate their maps; a model of user-contributed, “added-value content” that has

worked out so well for Amazon.com.

Meanwhile, web toolkits made by enthusiastic amateurs, like WorldKit and

GPSVisualizer, allow you to make your own maps via the Web. Geourl, a

successful early system for adding geotags to web pages, has been suc-

ceeded by different schemes for annotating weblog feeds—in any of several

flavors of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) format.

Once your web pages or weblog entries are annotated with geotags, not only

can you make interesting visualizations of ...