Making Customized Google Maps

Newspapers have been using Google Maps as one way to do alternative story telling. And now aspiring superjournalists can practice at home with geoXtract.

I found this program through a post in mediabistro or journerdism or something like that, but I have been playing around with it for about a week now, and it is kind of interesting. I just made a map of my spring break road trip, but it was a good way to get a feel for the program.

Basically you input in Excel Spreadsheet with the addresses you want to plot and any additional information that you want to pop up when someone scrolls over the marker on the map. The program uses this information to "geocode" the address, and--bata-bing, bata-boom--it spits out a Google Map at the end with your map points plotted on it.

Ok, it isn't actually that easy. It took me some fiddling to get my spread sheet into the right format that it could read, but it does make a pretty cool map.

The free version does not have a lot of features. For example, as far as I can tell you can only use one type of marker for all the points on the map, so you can't use a gas station marker and a restaurant marker for different locations.

Let me know if you try it out, and you figure out anything cool to do with it.