If you’ve been following the comments in this blog, you’ll note that Simon Dixon has unwrapped NewsMap, which he says
puts a newsroom-friendly face on the Google Maps API. The end-user sees an annotated map (or satellite image), with various points of interest marked on it, using custom icons. The points are presented in a sequence, allowing the map’s creator to tell a story in flowing narrative, or simply to encourage continued click-throughs.
This is a nicely done initiative, and shows the kind of thing that maps make possible.
on Jun 10th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Sounds comparable to Atlas (www.fmatlas.com), a free, easy-to-use front end for Google Maps that came out in October last year, designed by Fanieul Media out of Boston and also aimed at the journalism crowd. I’ve been able to convince a number of college journalists to dig into maps using this software. The one difference – at least from what I read – is that it allows you to put things into a sequence. Not sure that atlas has done that.
on Jun 15th, 2007 at 4:40 am
[…] imagined. I’m really grateful for the complimentary references and links from people like Dan Gillmor and Jeff Jarvis… and I’m sorry we didn’t have anything more tangible we could […]
on Jun 15th, 2007 at 5:44 am
For anyone who’s interested, we’ve just launched a demo of the application on our website, puffbox.com. It includes the sequencing functionality (which wasn’t used by Sky News) – and we’ve got an early visual of the polygon functionality we’re working on. We’ve been delighted by the response to the app, and we’re considering how we might take it forward.