Google, GIS, GPS and More Keys To The Kingdom

Saw an absolutely fantastic blog post today on another “technogeek” sort of blog … Posted by Pamela Fox, of the Google Maps API Team you can see it here:

It looks like this ….

So, what’s so special? Looks like Pamela mapped her fav restaurants to Google Maps …

Well, there’s just a little bit more to it than that. The source data for the restaurants geographical coordinates are on a Google Docs and Spreadsheet file. So that means they can be updated, edited, added to by others … anything the owner of the spreadsheet allows … from anywhere in the world by anyone with a web browser. The data are not locked away in some one’s proprietary or hard to reach database server. Not a bad thing toward opening information to the “rest of us”. But here’s the really kewl thing … this thing is so slick that it could keep up with John Chow and all his meals out.

The restaurants are mapped live to Pamela’s blog from that spreadsheet … and it takes only a few lines of code. Actually I “borrowed” the code snippet for a few minutes and had the map above running on my blog, live, in only the same amount of time it takes to publish a blog post with text and a .jpg. Absolutely fascinating.

If you like maps or have needs for showing data … including tracking movements on the map … we already know how easy that is, head on over to Pamela’s blog and see how easy Google makes it. This is fantastic stuff, the stuff “real” GIS companies spend their lives telling you can’t be done.

Can you tell that I love Google?