Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

New Feature: Where in the World is Andy?

As many of you know, I've been hopscotching the world over the last month, attending a variety of digital divide conferences. I became interested in figuring out a way to connect my blog to a mapping tool so readers could see maps of where I was traveling.

My first experiment was with a tool called GeoSketch, which is supposed to create maps of cities you mention in your blog. It seems like a killer idea, but unfortunately the server that processes the maps appears to be dead at the moment, so I wasn't able to get it working.

Then, I discovered another tool called WorldKit. Basically, WorldKit generates a Macromedia Flash map of the world, and allows you to mark the map with text and images based on latitude and longitude. Each time you plot something on the map, you can hyperlink it to a web page as well. It's a fairly simple tool, though you need to be able to look up the latitude and longitude of places you want to plot on the map. But apart from that, it's just a matter of editing the XML code of an RSS feed, filling it in with descriptions of each place you want to plot on the map.

So after a little bit of experimentation, I've created a small image of a world map, which you can now see on the left side of my homepage. If you click the title of the map, you'll be brought to another page, Where in the World is Andy? This shows a map of the world, marked up with the various places I've recently traveled, and where I'm going next.

It's a neat little tool, but it requires manual upkeep unless you're creative enough to auto-generate latitude and longitude data in your blogs, which is a little too uber-tech for my limited skills. Perhaps when I get back from my trip to Tunisia I'll create a map for my photo.spotlight photo blog. Until then, give it a try and let me know what you think... -andy