ResearchBuzz

If you’ve used Google Maps to find businesses, you’ll know that it’s had reviews available for businesses for a long time — content that was pulled from other places like CitySearch and Insiderpages. Google has recently announced that you’ll now be able to see user-created reviews at the Web site as well. There’s also a nifty way to see user-created content, but one thing at a time.

First thing: head over to maps.google.com and run a search. I decided I wanted to find a Super 8 near Walla Walla, Washington, therefore “super 8″ walla walla wa Google Maps gave me 129 results (most of them NOT Super 8 motels, but whatever.) Click on the “more info” link beside a listing and you’ll get a map pointer with several tabs providing general information, reviews, Web pages, and photos (there were four photos; three were the same shot and one of them looked like an ivy covered window.) From that window you can click “Write a Review” and provide your own impressions along with a star rating.

At the bottom of the search results you’ll see a “See user-created content” link. Click that and you’ll get links to other Google Maps that incorporate points from your search results, which is kind of cool. For the Walla Walla example I found hotel maps, tourism maps, winery pointers, and a couple of “My Town” type maps. I also found that if you put in a noun or a preference of some sort and then a location you could get very interesting maps. Vegan Chicago was fun. Most of the Google Maps worked, though occasionally the map would be too large to view, formatted incorrectly, or once (in the case of a SmugMug map) couldn’t be found.

I didn’t see too many reviews generated by Google Maps users — Google needs to push that feature I bit. I did enjoy seeing how different locations fit into all kinds of different maps, though!

Catching up … Google has announced in their blog that they’re down with the “so easy a cave man can do it” meme. Oh, and they’re also allowing users to make their own Google Maps with the new My Maps feature.

The instructions for using the new My Maps feature are at http://maps.google.com/help/maps/userguide/index.html . As you might expect, you’ll have to have a Google account to use the My Maps feature. Start at maps.google.com, and choose the My Maps tab. You’ll be given an option to create a new Google Map as well as browse other maps that folks have created.

It’s surprising what you can add to a map. You can add placemarks, of course, as well as lines or shapes. But you can also add photographs or even videos. You can use rich text or HTML descriptions as well. To get an idea of what’s possible, visit the map of Olympic locations, which has a little commentary, different placemarks, and HTML and images in the descriptions.

(I tried to use Google to see how other people were using the My Maps feature and had a little luck with the query inurl:ms site:maps.google.com/maps/ . But there isn’t much there.)

Once you’ve generated the map, you have the option to make it public or private as you choose. You can also get a KML file that you can display on Google Earth. You can grab a distinct URL that you can share with others.

What you CAN’T do — and the reason I probably won’t be using this feature much — is embed the map in your own page. I looked around for some way to JavaScript a generated map onto your own site, and I didn’t see one. I like the flexibility that’s been given — you can really make and personalize a map — but how about a little more help getting it on your site?

Several years ago the thing was to demonstrate new searching technology by taking ODP data and Doing Things to it. Now it appears the data pool of choice is Wikipedia. I am not complaining. The latest one I’ve come across is PediaX, which is in beta. PediaX ( http://en.pediax.org/ ) allows you to browse Wikipedia via a map.

When you first hit the site you’ll get a map with radio-button toggles to narrow down the kind of markers you want to find on the map. (There are tens of thousands of articles mapped here; available marks include cities, states, countries, landmarks, and mountains. The markers are the typical red Google upside-down teardrop things.) You’ll get different markers depending on what you zoom in on; the map displays the markers for the 20 most popular articles for that area. (Some parts of the map, especially bodies of water, don’t have 20 markers.) Look to the nav on the left for a permanent link to the map at that zoom level.

Click on a marker and you’ll get a popup window with the first part of the relevant Wikipedia article, with a link to get the entire Wikipedia article on PediaX.org. PediaX’s Wikipedia version offers a framed page with content in the middle, nav on the left, and on the right nav for the article as well as link to the most popular incoming and outgoing links (I think; I couldn’t get these to work with Firefox.)

In addition to wandering around the map you can search; PediaX offers search suggestions (as you type it’ll provide you with possible searches.) A search for Indianapolis provided a dozen search suggestions, some of which I would have guessed (Indianapolis Colts) and some I wouldn’t (Indianapolis-Carmel metropolitan area.) Search results for these will take you directly to the Wikipedia page, though; results are not mapped (wouldn’t that be cool?)

Now obviously you can’t map everything in Wikipedia. But I can easily imagine planning to go on a trip somewhere and using this resource to browse the Wikipedia articles for the area. Worth a look.