I just had that after playing with the BBC Dimensions site http://howbigreally.com/ – it describes itself well:

Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.

Or more detail

Dimensions is an experimental prototype for the BBC. We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. The D-Day landing beaches measured from London to Norfolk in the UK. How far would the Titanic stretch down your street?

Dimensions simply juxtaposes the size of historical events with your home and neighbourhood, overlaying important places, events and things on a satellite view of where you live. Certain “Dimensions” can be transformed into short walks, so you can get a physical appreciation of the distances involved.

It is a fantastic way to put historical and current events on a human scale, but overlaying the extent of ancient cities, natural disaters, even the moon, on any where you pick on a Google Map (usually your house).

Here were a few I played with in about 10 minutes:

The Great Wall of China Built Over Phoenix Arizona

Some people in the US really want a wall on the southern border- China has experience in projects like this.
http://howbigreally.com/dimension/ancient_worlds/great_wall_of_china#phoenix_az

The 2010 Gulf Oil Spill Happening in the Grand Canyon

This is why we do not allow oil drilling in our national parks (well also because there is not much oil down near Phantom Ranch)

http://howbigreally.com/dimension/environmental_disasters/gulf_oil_spill#grand_canyon_az

The Mars Rover Roaming From My Home Town

The Mars rover could easily drive up AZ 87 to the top of the RIM- that off road stuff is going to be tricky as it dashes down a canyon.

http://howbigreally.com/dimension/space/mars_rover_route#strawberry_az

I can see all kinds of potential for learning activities using this tool -and you can see that once you do an overlay, you can easily share the URL for others to look at, use, modify. Dimensions has categories of

Woah.

I am just now waiting to see if my favorite cycnical historian has criticism ;-)

Woah!

I’ve been saying that annotating maps is one of the most under-used edtech tools, given the wonderful capabilities one can do (for free) in Google MyMaps– Gmaps are more than finding driving locations to the nearest sushi bar. The fact that you can mark up anywhere in the world with information you pin on a map, is (to me) astounding, but I’m kind of a map nerd.

I’ve done a number of these maps for various reasons, but don’t always go back to them. But woah, my not so serious maps of places where people get Starbucks staff to say the word “large” (rather than foo foo ‘venti’) has like 18,000 views! That’s insane.

Open public maps are fine for projects and such, but it means that people have license to remove your description (I saw one conference map where someone placed the content they wanted in the map bubble inside my map description), and heck, look at the Starbucks map again; Jay Cross seems to have spammed it with a self promoting pin. Or he was confused. At least we know where he lives.

My new quest for the summer (at least) is reclaiming (some of) my weekend time, which has been lately filling with that gray boundary zone where work fuzzes out to the tech stuff I do on my own. So I am making more time for the offline activities, like today’s trip up to a new lake south of Flagstaff where I spent a good 2 hours paddling around in my kayak (well some of that time was sitting under a shade tree enjoying a cold beer).

But my tech genes don’t shut off completely, so I have my flickr photos posted, and tonight I was interested in starting a map with the lakes I have explored, going even back to my first dip in October 2007 when Westley Field took my paddling in the Sydney Harbour. So it did not take too much time to assemble my kayak map: I used the thumbnail size images of my flickr photos inside each pin.

View Alan’s Kayak Spots in a larger map

I still have some echoes of the excitement when I watched the Google Wave demo video on the brief but when they were co-browsing in real time, from different machines, a Google map. This still is one missing piece of maps, making them a shared social media experience.

So whats your take on maps? Where do you see people doing interesting things with them? Pinning static info on a map is obvious, but what about edgier things? I’ve been trying to suggest doing storytelling in GMap. What about a game? ARG? a treasure hunt? a puzzle? a math problem?

What’s on your map?

Over the course of several months beginning October 2008 to April 2009 I’ve spent some of my spare time between commercial projects searching Google Maps hoping to discover land formations or buildings resembling letter forms. These are the results of my findings limited within the state of Victoria, Australia.

With seeing the letterset, my mind leaped to spell with flickr, and a bit of copy paste got me a personalized logo courtesy of this alphabet.

Australia, thus is calling me

The sources are
c o g d o g

So maybe an interesting class/group assignment might be to find an alphabet in your own region… Hmmm, I know of a river bend on the Little Colorado River that would make a great C….

Update: I completely forgot about geoGreeting which I blogged back in 2006 – it has a very cool way of rendering your message; not exactly the same as finding your own letter, but still fun.