Monday, October 29, 2007

Make Them Yourself: Google Maps

Now I swear I'm not the ECIT Woodruff Fellow in Applied Googletechtonics or anything like that. If I was, perhaps my stipend would be a bit larger.

Be this as it may, I have another G-related observation. In addition to planning the upcoming Emory Horizons event, I have also been experimenting with making my own Google Map. Why would you want to do this? Well in my case, I figured it would be an easy way to represent my job search. I can get a general idea of where the jobs are at and refer to it when I have to make those tough choices between Tufts, Rutgers, and Westminster. This is also an easy way to share this information with my family and, eventually, to start thinking geospatially about my future.

This is actually really easy to do. All you have to do is to be logged in to a Google account, and go to their maps page. Click on the "My Maps" tab partway down the page, and you can start adding place markers, drawing lines, and/or shapes on your map. You can then get a URL or the code to embed the map. Of course, you can make the map public or private. Or as KML for use in Google Earth.

More and more, I think that geospatial information is going to become more and more a part of everything we do. And this is an easy way to get a start mapping your own experiences.


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4 comments:

Michael E. said...

Very interesting, Brian. A non-map question: Is this your full list of applications?

Brian said...

This is not the full list of applications. There are more to come, but I'm adding them on as I've applied for them, more or less. It makes me feel like I've accomplished something when I can add a marker to the map.

I'll take my sticks and carrots wherever I can find them.

Michael E. said...

That makes sense. I was just curious how big a list the 20th c. jobs are this year.

Brian said...

Well, there are maybe 30-35 jobs in 20th century that I think I can apply to. I'm obviously not applying to ads where they really want African American lit.

Your comments have led me to start color coding the jobs on the map. The blue ones are more or less things that are asking for 20th century lit; the yellow ones are things that are more on my periphery (media studies or things where I have to stretch my descriptions a little). Red represents total random shots.