MapTrot Needs a New Home!

MapTrot has been a labor of love, very educational, and a lot of fun for the folks here at Maptrot.com, but we need a change.

MapTrot continues to grow daily with new users, new maps, and new visitors checking out the maps. There are a lot of opportunities to make MapTrot an even easier to use application with a lot more features.

The problem, though, is a lack of time to devote to this endeavor!

For this reason, we're looking for a buyer or partner to take over the site and/or the code base. There's a lot of useful code underneath, and tremendous potential to make the site itself much more than it is.

Here's a Google Doc with information about how MapTrot is built and where we think there's some great value: MapTrot Value Writeup

We're certainly not closing up shop anytime soon and would consider any kind of partnership, technology license, consulting agreement, or purchase that makes sense for everyone.

Please contact us at info@maptrot.com if you'd like to discuss in more detail.

Amazon.com Gift Certificate Winner!

Congratulations to user morten who created this map:



Link to Map

This map combines layers with a single location point to show a trip through Norway!

Thanks for the cool map morten and enjoy the gift certificate!

Nice Blog Mention

Jeff Barr is a guy I've known for 20 years in the software biz, he's now working at Amazon evangelizing their services.

He wrote a nice blog entry about MapTrot, Available Here

thanks Jeff!

Disclaimer... Nope, we're not using the amazon services here, but ya know, they are pretty darn cool, and I've definitely looked at them with an interested eye!

Check it out: Amazon Web Services Page

Create a Map, win a $40 Amazon.com Gift Certificate!

How do we know if MapTrot is useful (and bug free) if we don't have lots of people using it?

To encourage more users, more map creation, and to celebrate all the new KML functionality (see next post), we're giving away a $40 Amazon.com gift certifcate!

Just create a map in May, publish it, and send the url to your friends, family, workmates, email lists, and anyone who might be interested. Make a map (which can include layers, of course!) about something topical, interesting, or just plain fun, and get the word out so people can see it.

With the new Digg/Reddit/Netscape/Delicio.us/StubleUpon submission buttons at the top of every map, it's easy to submit your maps to those services for other people to check out and comment on.

It's fun, but it helps us shake out the system, find bugs, see what people really create (and view) and let's us figure out what's working and what's not.

Whoever creates the map with the most views at the end of May, will win a $40 Amazon.com Gift Certificate.

Good Luck!

If You Can't Beat Em - Join Em! Maptrot Now Supports KML/GeoRSS (MyMaps, et al)

When I started building MapTrot, there were no other 'create your own map' sites. Now there are a bunch of them. Google did not have MyMaps, either, and now they do.

So what's an aspiring Map creation site to do? Be inclusive!

MapTrot now supports adding any number of "Layers" to a created map. These layers can be a KML or a GeoRSS URL. What does that mean? It means you can create a map anywhere that supports KML or GeoRSS, and include that map in a MapTrot map. You can, of course, still add additional locations to the map as well, just as before.

How cool is that? Very.

You can find some related maps and put them together on the same map page.

For instance, here's a combination of 3 KML map files (Ontario Parks, US National Parks, and North Carolina Parks), plus one location I added for Rocky Mountain National Park:

Link To Full Map
Note that, as above, you can link to or embed your mashed up maps.

Here's another example, this list of the 10 best places just came out for singles, families, retirees, etc. I created each list seperately as a Google MyMap map, and then combined them all in one MapTrot Map:
Top Ten Places

Note that you can check/uncheck the layers to turn then off or on.

Now it's your turn! Find some cool KML or GeoRss files out there, and add em to your maps. Combine em and make new maps! The possibilities are endless!

BUT WAIT, that's not all... you can also export your published maps to KML (click the KML icon at the top)! This allows you to view your MapTrot created map locations in Google Earth or any tool that reads KML. What about using a MapTrot map as a layer in another MapTrot map?? Yup, you can do that.

The KML exports just the Locations you've created on a map, though, it doesn't export the information from any layers you've created.

Happy Mapping!

The Joys of GeoCoding

As anyone who's made maps, or map applications can tell you, geocoding is one of the most important, but difficult aspects. Taking an address, like "12 main st., Boston, ma" and turning it into a map coordinate is a very difficult and hardly ever perfect science.

First of all, the string needs to be parsed and turned into something the address lookup can understand. Is "st." the same as "street"? Is the word after the street, in this case, "Boston", the city? If so, how about: "12 main st., Suite 200, Boston, ma". "Suite 200" is not the city! A lot of clever and complicated rules need to be applied to figure out what the user is asking for. Most geocoders will accept a zipcode for city, state, which is usually a pretty accurate and easy thing for the user to enter.

Next, the address lookup tries to find the 'best match' for an address, so it may not really be what the user intended. For example, Google maps shows the above address somewhere between Charlestown and Somerville, not in Boston proper:



Did the user mean something else? Who knows? ;-)

Finally, there are licensing and usage issues with some lookups that come from proprietary sources. The google map api will not work for addresses in the UK or China, for this reason.

I've tried to address these shortcomings in MapTrot in a few ways. I've been looking into and trying to find another geocoding service that I can use to augment the google api. Yahoo is a good candidate as it's free, robust, worldwide, and easy to inegrate. The problem is that it does a miserable job in the two countries I need it most: the UK and China! It will find coordinates for most cities and towns, but usuaully fails on streets and addresses. I'm still looking for a better solution.

Even when the geocoder thinks it finds an address and returns map coordinates, the actual location of a street address (ie, a home or business) can easily be more than a block or two off! Since geocoders tend to know about streets and then try to figure out the addresses, they will usually hit a point on the correct street, but hardly ever right on the address.

Another way to address the difficulties in geocoding is to allow the user to pan/zoom in on a map and create locations by selecting points on the map. This is a new feature of MapTrot, that has just been added. Click anywhere on the map and a "New Address" dialog is presented to enter any other location information desired (like notes, a title, a url, etc.).

Building MapTrot

I've been working on MapTrot since the summer of 2006, so I suppose it's time to write a blog about it! ;-)

MapTrot started the same way a lot of web tools do - I saw a need that wasn't being met and thought I could do it.

I love maps, and thought google maps were great, especially with the satellite imagery they added a few years ago. I constantly wanted to create maps with multiple addresses, though. If I was going on a trip, or going to a few places in town that I wanted on a map, I couldn't do that.

I've been an application and web developer for years, so I dug into the Google Maps API and thought, wow, that's pretty easy! Once I had multiple locations, I realized that saving and editing previous maps would be a snap.

I've also been working on AJAX apps, so this is testbed and workspace for me to push some nice Web 2.0 kinds of technologies, interactions, and designs.

As MapTrot has been in use, a lot of new functionality as emerged: map sharing, RSS syndication, integrations with other apps, and a bunch more stuff in the pipeline!

I hope you find it useful and fun.

Please feel free to email me if you have any questions or comments.

Bob Rose
bobbrose@maptrot.com