Note: this page does not always render properly in MSFT IE, but it has been 100% reliable thus far in Mozilla Firefox. We are investigating this bug

Experimental questions:

• how easy is this?
• for what kind of applications is it most useful?

Grateful acknowledgment to brhody's code samples, which supplemented the reference docs and code provided by Google.

How easy?

Google provides the mapping API at no charge to registered users, along with limited code samples and pretty good docs. I have very limited programming experience, but found editing the code samples I found was very straightforward after browsing through them a couple of times to understand their structure and syntax. To see our code, "View --> Page Source" (in Firefox) and see also the associated /data.xml file (replace "googlemapsmashup3.html" with "data.xml" in the url in the browser's address bar.

For what?

Not worth the trouble for a static map. But for anything where location will vary frequently, and/or where overlays of supplemental information displayed on a map provide the most usable way to consume that information, this is a great tool. See The Google Maps Mania Blog for many examples of interesting applications. See also our Marketspace Restaurant Review Beta application developed with the Ning service.

What's next?

Specification: use Google Maps to present locations of upcoming Marketspace speaking engagements.

Here's our effort as of October 17, 2005:

Next step: a web form plus RDBMS to manage the data that ends up in "data.xml"