How the World Celebrates Christmas

Google's countdown to their live Santa Tracker today features a neat map that provides information on Christmas traditions around the world.

Click on one of the marked countries on the map and you can learn all about how the people celebrate Christmas. For example, have you heard of the Christmas Cat in Iceland who eats you if you are not equipped for the cold Christmas weather.



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Mapping Global Urbanization

One of the biggest social changes around the world in the last two hundred years has been the continued shift in populations from rural areas to towns and cities. The global rise in urbanization is an ongoing process and is predicted to continue in the 21st Century.

The UNICEF Urban Population Map is a fascinating visualization of the rise of urbanization around the world since 1950. It also

Public Rest Rooms on your Route

The Australian Government's Department of Social Services as part of the National Continence Program has released the National Public Toilet Map. The map provides information on over 16,000 public toilets with information about accessibility, opening hours and facilities, such as showers & baby change.

The National Toilet Map uses the Google Maps API to allow Australians to search for nearby

Wolfram Alpha on Google Maps

Wolfram Alpha the online answer engine that gives factual answers to queries by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents, has a comprehensive API.

Jan Pöschko has used the API to create Alpha Maps, a Google Map that allows users to view useful information about locations given by Wolfram Alpha on a map.

To use the application you just need to enter a location into the search box. The map then displays nearby locations as generated by Wolfram Alpha and also returns reams of data about the searched location. The information provided includes demographic information, economic data, current weather and time, crime statistics and other useful information, such as notable people born in the searched location.

Remapping Cities with Google Maps

Livehoods is an interesting project to remap city neighborhoods by ignoring the traditional geographical boundaries and instead looking at human social interactions.

By analysing over 18 million Foursquare check-ins Livehoods, a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has produced three city maps with new neighborhoods based on the patterns of the groups of people that check-in to Foursquare venues.

So far there are three Livehoods maps: New York City, San Francisco, Pittsburgh. The dots on the maps represent different check-in locations. Groups of nearby dots of the same color form a Livehood. The groups are determined when the same people check-in to two nearby locations.

Create a Google Maps Context Menu

Martin Pearman has released a right-click context menu library for the Google Maps API. ContextMenu creates a menu for Google Maps that appears when users right click on the map.

The menu could be used for a whole range of user interactions. Martin has created an advanced example map where the right-click menu has been used to allow users to set the start and end points to get driving directions. The right-click menu in this example also allows the user to zoom in and out and centre the map on the clicked location.

The code for the context menu has been made available under a GNU copyleft license. Here is a direct link to the JavaScript for the menu - ContextMenu.js

Killing Zombies on Your Phone

One of the most popular Google Maps based games Zombie Outbreak Simulator is now available as an iPhone app.

Zombie Outbreak Simulator allows you to play a game of zombie survival on top of a Google Map of your own neighborhood. In the game your job is to kill off all the zombies before they have picked off the entire civilian population. Alternatively you can just sit back and watch to see how long it would take a zombie invasion to finish off your neighbors.

You can purchase the Zombie Outbreak Simulator iPhone app from the App Store.