A wonderful mashup from the Dutch TV station, VPRO, seems to be ground-breaking in its creative use of Google Maps, historical information, and a timeline. This website, In Europa, is part of the promotion of a grand TV series about 20th century Europe, based on the so-named book by Geert Mak. If only the website were in English! (But of course it will be eventually, one would think, as the book has already been translated into German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Polish and Turkish.) Editors are still hard at work to keep ahead of the viewing schedule, every Sunday from now until, well, 35-episodes later. At IDFA, six episodes were shown, an intro, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1929, and 1942. According to marketing folks, there is interest from PBS in the States. The Google Maps interface was designed by Gerard van Enk, of Million Pieces. He discusses development considerations for the site here, in Dutch. On the site, visitors are encouraged to send their own clips and sound-bytes (maybe heralding a new era of collaborative map-based historical research, wiki-style?)
Archive for December, 2007
You can’t take your eyes off them for a second. Terrain view in Google maps adds a new dimension. It is not as powerful as its counterpart in Google Earth, where elevations can also be measured and displayed. Not yet. But more is clearly on the way. Last week they also launched collaboration “OurMaps“, which is bound to spearhead a huge new category of online map applications. And finally, another major announcement, push-button import of KML, KMZ and RSS files into MyMaps. This was possible with a little programming (using the API) before, but now everyone can do it! (Well, sort of.)
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