Last week’s presentation on tag clouds, mash ups, and other visualizations was very interesting and got me searching for other mash ups. I was totally amazed by the number of mash ups people are generating using the maps that google provides and other data sets. Google Maps Mania is a blog run by Mike Pegg that tracks the vast number of mashups people are creating using Google Maps. There’s also a list of 100 Things to do with Google Maps Mashups.

 

There are a range of mash ups available from light-hearted ones like tracking UFOs, finding who is sick in your neighbourhood to more serious ones like Climate change maps, most polluted cities in the world, global incident maps, etc.

Educational Institutes, organizations like GlobalVoices (a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society) and UNESCO, among others, are using Google maps for environmental mash-ups, displaying epidemiological data, mapping World heritage sites, etc.

 

I guess the latest introductions are the Google Maps Facebook applications, among them King (or Queen) of the World (a territorial game of diplomacy, alliances and battles), Unype (playing games inside Google Earth and Google Maps, with all social networks as entry points.)

 

Darshana, 3/3/08