Map Scripting

NPR’s David Greene is in the midst of a 100 day road trip, covering the U.S. economic crisis. He has talked to a restaurateur in Michigan, scoreboard-maker in Ohio and young Georgians about to enter a workforce with questionable options, among many others. So, he’s creating a lot of content along the way. That sort of road trip was just begging for a map component and now it has one.

The feature uses an embedded My Map (above), Google’s map mashup tool. Greene periodically plots his route and marks his current location. As he files reports for NPR or takes photos, he adds special markers with links to the content.

The map has a few rough edges, but overall I’m impressed. I never gave My Maps much consideration because so often I populate maps with dynamic content from a database. For a non-programmer sharing a trip, it gets their map to its destination with a lot less overhead than it would take to custom code.

I’d love to see every roadtripper chronicle their journey in a similar way. I’m looking at you, TumbleWagon.