From the eating habits of herons to homicides in Los Angeles, newspapers are using Google Maps to accompany stories, to get readers involved in reporting those stories and to document events in real time online. ...
The Grantham Journal is using a map to track a rogue heron that has taken a fancy to the town’s pond life. Readers and journalists plot the heron’s whereabouts.
The LA Times has a map documenting every murder on its patch. It is possible to filter the map using various parameters from cause of death to age and race. The map links to photos and comments, and readers can subscribe to customised RSS feeds from the map. ...
There are flight-tracking maps, weather trackers and a blog, Google Maps Mania, dedicated to documenting useful and unusual ways in which the technology is used, including a map that traces the actual locations used in the famous car chase through the streets of San Francisco in the film Bullit. ...
So, how do you get a Google Map on to a newspaper website? Well, you can simply create it and link out to it, as the Grantham Journal does, or you can embed the map into your website by copying the code the map generates. ...
It is technical, but once you understand the basics, it is essentially a copy and paste job. It is possible to include local search within your map, create “mapplets” – which means you can embed externally hosted applications – or overlay information such as road traffic, directions or, as The Daily Telegraph, Grantham Journal and LA Times examples illustrate, anything of very specific interest to your readers.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Putting newspapers on the map
From a story in the U.K.-based Press Gazette:
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2 comments:
Something I've been wanting to do is map all the day's news stories. All of them.
Like these guys: Evening Leader (UK).
The problem is that this requires more work from our newsrooms and features that our existing print publication system doesn't have. All for what today seems like limited value (short sighted as that is).
Our Danish friends actually recommend using the "dateline" tag in ALL stories, regardless of whether it prints in the paper, for archiving purposes in the near future.
Whether this means we could have a "small integration" to map this to the web is unclear at the moment.
Tagging once can lead to automatic indexing etc....it's the time spent on tagging that's the issue.
No wonder some sites let the readers do the work. www.outside.in is, sometimes on our stories.
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