Both Google and Yahoo! have announced APIs for their mapping services. I’ve already gotten a developer key for the Google service. But it doesn’t support address searches, only lat/lon coordinates. So I’m thinking about applying for a Yahoo! key, using their service for geocoding (translating from street addresses to coordinates), then using Google’s mapping interface with all of its Ajaxy goodness.
I don’t know what I plan to actually do with this stuff, or when I’d find time to do it. But dagnabbit, I feel like I should be doing something!
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You should check out http://geocoder.us/help/ for the geocoding, would be less of a hassle than going through Yahoo.
Next time I’m bored I’m going to hack something together using the Google Maps API, that geocoder and my moblogging script to map where I’m blogging from. Unfortunately without GPS in my phone though I’ll have to type the address in the email. A totally useless thing to do but hey it will be fun.
Playing is fun. For a look at mix matching Flickr and Google API, with EXIF and other metadata, check out this page, go to bottom, and click link for photo details.
This isn’t Wordform specific. All of this is being made into WordPress plugins.
BTW — watch out for the Google API Key — it’s subdirectory specific right now.
Well I almost have my moblog hack working to show my location on Google maps, using http://geocoder.us and the Google Maps API, I’m just waiting on advice from the wp-hacker gurus for a way to get the Javascript needed through to the post somehow as at the moment it is geting escaped and borked as a result.
Everything else works though, it gets the lat & long from geocoder.us, and then requests the map from Google (well it would do if the script came through correctly). Once I have it working and have cleaned it up some I’ll post the code.
You can also use google maps to do geocoding. It isn’t documented, but it works. You will have to do some parsing to get the information.
Here is how to get the geocoded information:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=12345 anywhere st, anycity CA 99999&output=js
The resulting geocoded info is sent back in a span tag.
Something that looks promising is the new (Not released yet) http://earth.google.com. This looks very impressive.
Unfort*, earthdotgoogle is Windows only from what I can tell. Shame it isn’t a flashapp like the Flickr album.
What about creating real playable games on google maps? http://moloko.itc.it/trustmetricswiki/moin.cgi/GamesOnGoogleMaps
Check the code for “animated invasion of Microsoft Redmond office by gnus and mozilla”, if you like.
http://sra.itc.it/people/massa/private/gmaps/gmaps_hack.html
Or read the blog post:
http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/archives/2005/07/01/animated_invasion_over_google_map.html
Would someone be willing to help me with a small project I am working on? I would like to connect a GPS unit to my Soekris board and use the data on a Yahoo Map using the API? I would be willing to pay for the assistance.
Thanks,
Mike Chapman
i tried the automated geocoding parse and it works up until about 350th request/response.
then google sees there is no way one person requested 350 maps in 2 minutes and stops allowing the requests.
im going to add a sleep timer in my script to spread out the requests, but this most likely wont work either.
just going to have to buy a geocode dbase with address correction built into the API.
anyone know of any good geocoding services?
geocoder.us is 2 slow most of the time and has downtime, i was hoping for a local dbase with a good api.
USC has developed a new site for geocoding address data which is free, secure, accurate, and located at https://webgis.usc.edu – The site can process uploaded databases (access, csv, text delimited) or single ones. It does deterministic address parsing and normalization too.