Planet GeoSpatial

Those guys at Urban Mapping, famous in our industry for some of the best neighborhood boundary data, are doing more than just polygons these days. They’ve created Geo Fact Finder which had the original intention of illustrating the capabilities of their platform Mapfluence. Mapfluence is a web-based geoservices engine designed to push geo-intelligence to the browser. Mapfluence also maintains a data catalog, providing immediate and query-able access to geographic data. The Geo Fact Finder application is intended to visualize and explore geographic data; they’ve selected a subset of our 10,000+ variables and included them in different topic areas. You can select up to three topics at any one time. Built on the Bing Maps Platform, Urban Mapping created an application to visually explore a boatload of geographic data. Behind it, Mapfluence allows developers to make queries to support visualization (thematic mapping, heat mapping, etc.) and data queries (spatial joins, sorts and other number-crunching activities). What's great is that it also comes pre-configured with data on-demand: the application includes over fifteen distinct data themes that includes several dozen specific variables. Here, I’ve mixed Presidential Election Returns, Religious Affiliation and Average Monthly Snowfall to see if there’s a connection that I can pull from them. Can you find the connection?

Themes include air quality, tornadoes, hurricanes, precipitation, temperature, transportation infrastructure, educational performance, cost of living, unemployment rates, residential and business vacancy rate, voter turnout, demographics, sales and income tax rates, and consumer expenditures. This represents a massive amount of data that Urban Mapping sources and maintains, making it easy for developers to use their Javascript API. Geo Fact Finder is designed to show off some cool visualizations of data, and they tell me there are more applications coming soon. Keep an eye on these guys.

Follow Bing Maps @BingMaps, ^CP

Got a WordPress blog? Want to map out some information for your blog readers? Rich Gubby (@mobilewebjunkie) felt the need and wanted Bing Maps to do it. He took it a step further and created a WordPress plugin that allows for super simple configuration of a Bing Map that you can easily insert into your blog. Bing Maps for WordPress allows you to create maps easily with a [bingMap] shortcode in your posts. You don't have to worry about how the maps are displayed, the plugin takes care of that. You can create dynamic maps that allow your visitors to pan and zoom, or static maps that don't have those features. You can create Road maps, Aerial views, Aerial views with roads marked on them, or even a 3D Birdseye view.

There’s a short code to configure the map. After you’ve added the plugin extension, just using [bingMap] in a post you can configure the short code to have a Bing Map on your blog. You can control the location the map is centered on (no lat/lons required!); the map’s type, height and width; a map title; a type (static or dynamic); the zoom level and specify pushpins to be placed on the map. Using all the attributes your Bing Maps short code would look something like this:

[bingMap location=”Seattle, WA” width=”250” height"=”250” title=”Bing Maps Rocks” type=”dynamic” maptype=”AerialWithLabels” zoom=”15” pp1=”Seattle, WA”]

Note: you will need a Bing Maps Key; but, hey, they’re free! If you’re a blogger, love maps and especially love Bing Maps this plug in is for you! Get sign up for a free Bing Maps Key (you will need a Windows Live ID [also free]). More information about the plugin is found on the WordPress Bing Maps plugin page.

Follow me @BingMaps, ^CP

A while back I blogged about Internet Explorer Accelerators that used Bing services for quickly highlighting text and performing subsequent searches (see, “Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Includes Virtual Earth”). Well, Apple’s Safari browser has extensions that allow 3rd party services, such as Bing, to add on capabilities such as Bing Search, Bing Travel and arguably most important Bing Maps.

If you have Safari installed, go to the Safari Extensions page and download the Bing Highlights extension (from within Safari). Once you’ve installed the Bing Highlights extender for Safari, you can go to any web page within the Safari browser, highlight an address with your mouse or touchpad and you’ll see a pushpin icon in the extender. Clicking the pushpin will load a Bing Map right within Safari with links to view the address in Bing Maps or get directions to or from the respective location. Alternatively, click the magnifying glass and you’ll see some options for searching Bing. Select “Search for a map” and you will be magically transported over to Bing Maps with the location geocoded and centered at the respective match. So, now we’ve made it so easy to get maps even if you’re on Safari with a simple select and click.

Also, in case you were wondering, you can switch your default search in the Safari browser (upper right) to Bing too. Just click the down arrow in the search box and select Bing. Get your browser all Bing’d out! To learn more about the Bing Extension for Safari, read up on the Bing Search Blog.

Follow me @BingMaps, ^CP

 Exciting news of digitally showcasing the renowned Tour De France happening in real time this summer. Bing Maps and Team Radioshack are proudly teaming up to make social media a big part of this year's Tour De France. If you are a Tour De France fan and love this event, you need to check this out. This summer, everyone will be able to get live tour updates via geo-tagged tweets straight from the course in France and around the world on a Bing Twitter Map hosted by Team Radioshack and LIVESTRONG.com.

For the first time ever fans will be able to get real time geo-location based reactions and content from spectators, journalists, and even competitors during the big race. Fans will also be able to embed a customized Tour De France twitter map onto their own blogs to share with their own community and spread the excitement. Many Tour riders are active Twitter users including Lance Armstrong of Team Radioshack, who has over 2.5 million followers.

This map interface may look familiar to you. That’s because it’s based on the EMBED function from the Bing Twitter Map App. The Bing Twitter Map App allows you to embed a Bing map with respective tweets and and users filtered by location. Well, Tour de France is so big we built a site dedicated to our map app just for you. Tweet de France.com is a web site where you can take a Bing Map with the entire Tour de France trail drawn atop it and have geolocated Twitter feeds coming through on the map. The tweets are based on location / proximity to the race and a filter of “Tour de France.” You can now take this map and using the EMBED code below the map you can add a cool Bing Map element to your web site, blog or application.  Just copy the code, paste it into your HTML editor and view the page.

Follow me @BingMaps, ^CP

Mashable just launched a new function of their web site highlighting Local Twitter Trends on a Bing Map. The application is intended to give devoted Mashable readers the sense of trending topics in selected areas around the world. Using a Bing Map gives immediate context for the respective markets and the top trending topics from Twitter for the respective market. Wondering what people are tweeting about in New York? Click the pin in New York and the popup balloon will showing the top trends for what New Yorkers are Tweeting about. And, hey, this was so interesting, I sat down with Mashable CEO, Pete Cashmore to talk about it on camera.

Additionally, you can use search filters to edit the tweets appearing on the map. Just enter a keyword for a current trend and the results on the map will filter based on your location viewport and the respective keyword. So, if you want to know what people are saying about “Bing” in Los Angeles, you add “Bing” to the search filters, center the map over Los Angeles and you’ll see a Bing Map with Bing related Tweets geo-located atop the map. Finally, as part of the application, you can search for relevant articles on Mashable. Put in a keyword and select the “Mashable” tab to get a list of Mashable articles that have the respective keyword tied to different articles.

Mashable illustrates yet another way to integrate Bing Maps into a custom application using the Bing Maps Platform. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the map has become the default background for so much information. Why use the plain white background when you can have a beautiful vector map or aerial photo to plot out your data? Remember the gray background of Netscape 3 if you didn’t set the body bgcolor??? I digress. The possibilities are endless when it comes to the Mashable content I’d like to see mapped out, so it will be exciting to see the uptake on this new application.

Read more about Mashable and Bing Maps on the Federated Media blog.

CP – Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton