Last night at the Where 2.0 conference here in San Jose, we unveiled a new map format for outside.in that we’re really excited about. Right now, we’re featuring these maps for bloggers in our system, but shortly any registered neighbor will be able to have their own outside.in map.
The maps show all the posts by a given blogger that are associated with a specific place. That’s a useful enough feature, but what’s more interesting about these maps are the connections they make visible. Take a look at the map we’ve created for one of our favorite bloggers, Jason Kottke. (We’ve also created one for all the San Francisco posts from the legendary boingboing.) For each place Kottke’s written about, you’ll see a vaguely Pacman-like circle on the map. Some circles are entirely orange, which means that Kottke is the only blogger in our database who has written about that particular place. Others show a mix of orange and black, which represents the ratio of Kottke’s posts to all other posts about that particular place. The overall size of the icon represents the total number of posts.
What does this show you? First, it gives you an immediate vision of the geographic interests of a given blogger — their home turf. And then it shows you how “crowded” that territory is: are there lots of other commentators on the same places? Or has the blogger carved out his or her own territory. Compare the Kottke map, for instance, to the map for Blogchelsea; you can see in an one glance how concentrated and idiosyncratic Blogchelsea’s posts are; they’re covering that neighborhood in a way that no one else is.
The other useful thing about the map is that it quickly introduces you to the other bloggers who share the same spaces: when you roll the mouse over each place name, you get a list of all the stories attached to that particular place, and links to the blogger maps for each connected blogger. It’s an entirely new way to explore the placeblogger universe — check it out and let us know what you think!
[10/14/08 Update : We recently released new Google map widgets you can grab and install on your own site. Here's one in the wild.]
