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!

As Stephen suggested where he plotted his own tour of Metcalfe Ontario, this is a great simple activity one can do for some online storytelling- now with Google Street view, you can literally snap photos of your old neighborhood, and mix that with your memories, and shazam! Digital story.

It’s something most every person could do, assuming they have a childhood they don’t mind recalling.

But hee hee, it is not often one gets to say he did something way before Stephen, but (cough cough), I posted a memory map in flickr back in 2005 when a group started to collect similar photos

This was old school Google Maps- no street view to snap photos, so I used the Notes tool in flickr to annotate my map with bits of memories, sledding on Suicide Hill, the creepy corner that had been a Civil War slave cemetary, my old middle school, etc.

But its not about the platform or when someone did this; it’s about what opens when you post it online. In my case, I got a comment from Phil who is currently a student at my old school:

I go to Sudbrook. They are renovating the whole place…. I know exactly where your talking about. I will upload some pictures of the school now so you can see a difference (If they let me take some pictures). We have a new gym floor and new bleachers, air conditioning, new windows, new bathrooms, and new lights!! I have never heard of “Suicide Hill”.

And in a similar fashion, someone commented on Stephen’s map/story who grew up in the same town.

There is so much one can do with map based stories, especially with the ability to, in many places, even Strawberry Arizona, go into Street View mode.

For another twist, a few clicks back I noticed while exploring Street View in San Francisco (likely cause thats one of the few places one could see it), that often, the Google Camer Car would end up following another vehicle, so I had the idea to make up a movie following the path down Lombard Street… I see no reason why one could not use screen capture software, and make an audio narrated tour as you do a streetview walk through your old neighborhood (or even a new one).

Maps can add a whole new dimension or 3 to your stories.

But what is most interesting is the variety of ways people have managed to take Doug Peterson’s idea and create them in all kinds of tools.

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?

Fortunately they have painted my old room, but I did zoom in and see where I had carved my initials on the underside of the side steps (just kidding).

I sure do not miss racking leaves or cutting grass, but there is where I lived until I was 18. I took a drive past my elementary school, and up through some old neighbor hoods, and did not really recognize much.

Now the notion of moving through a map and really seeing what is there (or what was there when the Google-mobile went by) is something I would never have imagined even a few years ago. Does it turn the world into a peepers delight, or does it afford a way to explore different places and really see that they look like buildings, houses, parks, and not just lines and icons on a map. A map is but a representation of the world, and a photo map adds an interesting layer of information on top of that.

I do find it limiting that the Street View is limited to where they can drive the car with the ball camera on top– I keep wanting to be inside parks, peeking down a slot canyon in Utah, or looking at the Sydney Opera House, but you can only see where they have driven.

But I love the new interface…

Much too late, I do have a better answer now, Geocommons which (sigh, why would any site put a description of their service as a freakin graphic! let me copy paste!):

delivers visual analytics through maps; enabling non-technical professionals to view multiple datasets, draw conclusions, make decisions and solve problems without traditional GIS overhead

More or less, by clicking, you can select from a library of different data sets, and then layer them on a map (There are ways of adding your own data to the Finder).

Some quick examples:

• Prevalence of Bike Commuters in Less Obese States http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/566: So does one cause the other??
• Wait Time At Polls, November 4, 2008 http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/1334: using data from Twitter Vote Report
• Number of Facebook Users in the US http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/83?page=1: Is it for city folk only?
• Freshmen are Criminals http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/352?page=1: Not a conclusion I would make- looks like someone else was playing with data!

I gave it the 20 minute spin this morning, creating a world map that attempts to conclude that countries in violent conflict don’t do well in the Olympics (duh, it is just an experiment):

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/1475

There was another layer I had tossed in to map cities with the tallest skyscrapers, which was meaningless and made more clutter than interest.

I poked around the sets of data until I found two things that maybe were not directly associated. Data sets can be..data associated with place, but also include things like roadways and geographic boundaries (like school districts, maritime regions). There are display options for the way data is distributed and displayed (colors, circles or squares).

The data is tagged, and you can combine tags and keywords in the searches- the results are a bit tedious in that they are paged 4 at a time. It would also have been nice if once I had made base map on a world scale, if I could filter out data sets that were at a different scale (like crop yields in Iowa). The data is also spotty, in some places there are pages and pages of EPA data, but the geography boundary category only has 2 items. It would also be nice if the results had an embed code.

But this is minor compared to the kinds of things you can create by connecting data and maps, and to visualize relationships. You may not achieve the energy of Hans Rosling, but I see a lot of potential here, be it in learning how to look at data (and then research whether there is a real meaning or just accidental correlation). Or an activity to add your own geodata to the collection.

Mashing up data and maps is so easy a dog can do it!