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Tag: Mapdango

Mapdango mashes Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, Wikipedia, and more into your maps

Rick Turoczy on September 3, 2008

While mapping services are often one of the first places people start mucking with APIs and mashups, few take to it as well as Portland-based Cartosoft. Continuing to push the mapping mashup envelope, they’ve just announced the latest version of their award-winning flagship product, Mapdango.

Mapdango

From the Mapdango v2 post:

You spoke, emailed, and clicked – and we listened. After some relatively in-depth analysis for usage trends over the last four months or so, we custom-tailored mapdango to provide users with a better experience exploring different locations around the world.

So what’s new?

Well, what’s most important to a mashup? More stuff to mashup, of course. And Mapdango doesn’t disappoint. If it’s got an API available and some GIS info, it’s likely that it’s on Mapdango, now.

The Google Maps based tool now includes travel books from Amazon, news from Google News, weather from WeatherBug, photos from Panoramio, videos from YouTube, articles from Wikipedia, country demographic information from the US Census Bureau, geotagged Flickr photos, events from Eventful, social connections via Google Friend Connect (Mapdango was one of the early beta testers of the Friend Connect service), related news from Digg, links from FriendFeed, and “a whole bunch” of social bookmarking links.

To make things a little easier to digest, the single view map has now been split into three separate views: a dashboard, a map view, and a social view.

What’s more, they’ve added the ability to string queries through a URL, making it easier to bookmark and perform quick lookups:

We have made it even easier to add dynamic location links to mapdango. Simply add a URL-escaped location to the following URL, and mapdango will search for a location: http://www.mapdango.com/location.php?q=. For example, to search for Portland, Oregon, you would create a link to http://www.mapdango.com/location.php?q=Portland+Oregon.

All in all, this feature-rich release marks another leap forward for Mapdango and Cartosoft. And it serves as a positive reminder to the industry that—with the continued proclivity toward open data exchange—individuals hold the power to accumulate and manage tons of data within a single resource.

To try it for yourself, visit Mapdango. For more on the latest release, see the Mapdango v2 release post on the Cartosoft blog.

First Portland Google Friend Connect sighting? Mapdango may be it

Rick Turoczy on June 12, 2008

Earlier today, Portland’s Marshall Kirkpatrick had a post on the first Google Friend Connect widget observed outside of captivity, in its natural habitat:

Prominent Israeli tech blogger Orli Yakuel has just installed the first Google Friend Connect widget we’ve seen yet in the wild.

Read the post. Found it interesting. Filed it away.

Then, this evening, I’m reading through my feeds and what do I see? Portland-based Mapdango has added Google Friend Connect:

Friend Connect provides a simple, effective, and fairly universal way of adding social networking features to a web site. Although Friend Connect is still in private beta, mapdango is one of the lucky sites that now includes Friend Connect functionality (it took a little cajoling) 🙂

Now, that’s exciting!

So, what’s Google Friend Connect? Well, it’s a social-networking widget. The most readily available analogy I have is “the Yahoo! MyBlogLog widget on steroids.” Or, as Google says:

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Now granted, Google Friend Connect is not without its shortcomings—or its detractors. But let’s suspend disbelief for a brief moment, disregard that silly “privacy” thing, and revel in how cool it is to see a Portland company among the very fist to get the chance to test-drive this technology.

As always, I’m very interested to see where this goes.

To try Google Friend Connect for yourself, visit Mapdango.

Six map apps that put Portland on the mapping map

Rick Turoczy on April 8, 2008

Maybe it’s the fact that we’re a major inland port. Maybe it’s the affection for the outdoors that permeates the Portland culture. Whatever it is, we’ve got something for maps around here. Portland is map happy. And nowhere is that more evident than our obsession with the mapping APIs that further the technology of cartography.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the mapping and location apps that call Portland, Oregon, home. (Thanks in no small part to the reigning King of mapping, Matt King. An “*” below identifies each of his mapping projects.)

Platial

The most well-known Portland-based mapping application, Platial, is the largest independent social mapping application. According to the Platial site:

Platial enables anyone to find, create, and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them. Our dream is to connect people, neighborhoods, cities, and countries through a citizen-driven common context that goes beyond geopolitical boundaries. We are building Platial because we adore Places.

Unthirsty*

The admittedly “we did it for the fun of it project” that helps the would-be lush-on-a-budget find the nearest happy hour. And fast.

In Unthirsty‘s own words:

Unthirsty is the work of a group of like-minded souls who were always struggling (for obvious reasons) to remember where and when they last enjoyed that good happy hour. A plan of action was drawn up on beer sodden napkins over bargain pints and some mighty fine nachos. Thus, Unthirsty was launched and dedicated to the good of all mankind’s legally drinking denizens.

KnitMap*

Yearning for yarn? Look no further than KnitMap, your way to finding all of your needling knitting needs or simply getting your Turkish Cast-on on.

KnitMap describes itself as:

[A] site that catalogues and maps the locations of retail shops that sell yarn, knitting supplies and knitting accessories. You can search to find these locations in the US, Canada, UK and most of Europe. Its anywhere that Google maps will work, and the list is growing everyday! Once you’ve found a shop, you can rate it’s attributes, leave comments, upload photos, and add it to your Favorites.

SocialMap*

Think Unthirsty and KnitMap are cool, but interested in putting your own spin on the “plot and find [whatever] via Google Maps”? Then look no further than SocialMap, the mapping technology that powers both of those properties.

Why release SocialMap?

SocialMap was created to help solve the problems we encountered on the web within the communities we are a part of. Through its humble beginnings as a national Happy Hour finder, then a Knitting store locator, we noticed regions and groups that had a passionate user base, but were very underrepresented online. Existing websites and search engines were not only dated in their technology but lacked the ability for users to interact with the information presented.

Mapdango

Winner of the “Best Mashup” at this year’s Mashup Camp, Mapdango takes other API-accessible content and plots it on the map.

Mashup Awards described Mapdango as:

An extensive Google Maps mashup that lets you explore locations with helpful information including weather (WeatherBug), photos (Flickr), facts (Wikipedia), events (Eventful), news (Google News) and more.

WeoGeo

New to the Portland mapping scene, WeoGeo takes a deep dive into online cartography, providing extremely detailed mapping options.

[WeoGeo] supplies surveyors, engineers, cartographers, and scientists with the ability to conveniently store, search, and exchange high-resolution CAD and GIS mapping products. Mappers easily list their data for sale. Researchers quickly find the data they need.

(Bonus) TwitterLocal* (formerly known as TwitterWhere)

It’s not a mapping application, per se, so I didn’t want to include it on the list. But TwitterLocal is another Matt King project that makes location information useful in the context of Twitter. Simply plug in a location and TwitterLocal will provide an RSS feed of the Twitter residents in that area, like Portland, for example. It’s a valuable tool for getting a feel for your neighborhood Twitter types.

That’s just a short list. But, admittedly, there’s so much mapping occurring in map-happy Portland, that I may have missed some obvious maps. If I did, please feel free to admonish me in the comments.

Mapdango tops Mashup Camp charts

Rick Turoczy on March 25, 2008

Mapdango, a slick mapping mashup from Portland-based CartoSoft that has always impressed me, has now impressed a whole heck of a lot more people—including some folks down in Mountain View, CA—by winning the Best Mashup at Mashup Camp.

According to Andres Ferrate, CartoSoft’s Head Honcho and the development power behind Mapdango [Editor: Emphasis is mine]:

There were some great mashups in the contest, including several location-based product availability mashups, some mobile mashups (very cool to think about the emerging possibilities of mashing stuff around for devices), iMovie mashups, a Flickr history mashup, and more. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to see all of the mashups that were competing. Nice to think the little mashup from Portland gave those Silicon Valley mashups a run for the bling bling.

For more on Mapdango and other geospatial magic, visit CartoSoft.