About the ACME GeoRSS Map Viewer

location based services

Synopsis
This is a Google Maps app that displays Yahoo! Simple Maps files. It implements all of Yahoo!'s enhancements to GeoRSS, including address geocoding, plus a couple of things from basic RSS that Yahoo! missed. Feel free to use it with your own GeoRSS and Yahoo! Simple Map files.
Background
GeoRSS is a simple XML-based file format used for adding location information to data items. It is based on RSS 2.0, plus a couple additional elements - and - that let you specify the geographical location of each element.
Yahoo! took GeoRSS and added a bunch more elements of their own. The most significant difference is that the latitude and longitude elements are optional in Yahoo!'s version. If you prefer, you can specify the location by street address. Yahoo! then does geocoding behind the scenes to turn the addresses into latitude and longitude.
Creating a Yahoo! Simple Map is just a matter of writing a fairly simple XML file, while creating even the simplest Google Maps app requiries writing a program in JavaScript. Since most people are not programmers, you might expect Yahoo! Simple Maps to vastly outnumber Google Maps apps. In fact, the reverse seems to be true: there are many more Google Maps apps than Yahoo! Simple Maps. Why? I think it's just because Google Maps is prettier and has a more pleasant user-interface. Yahoo! eventually decided the same thing, and came out with AJAX and Flash APIs that are just as nice as Google's. But they are also as complicated to program as Google's.
So, this page tries to give you the best of both worlds. It reads the same XML data files used by Yahoo! Simple Maps, does the same geocoding, but it displays the data as a Google Map. This lets you combine the ease of creating a Yahoo! Simple Map with the nice user-interface of a Google Maps app.
This page also does automatic clustering. This means if your map has a whole bunch of markers on it, then instead of trying to display them all and slowing down to a crawl, the markers will get grouped together into cluster markers. If you zoom in further so that fewer markers are in the map area, they will show up as individual markers again.
Examples
Here are some sample maps:
California State Parks
Alan Brown put together a great map of all the California State Parks. It uses groups for different types of parks, so it's very colorful.
BART and Caltrain stations Together
Jeffrey McManus made a map of BART stations, and Trifon made one of Caltrain stations. You can view them separately, or mashed together on one map.
Yahoo! Traffic Alerts near
Yahoo! has an API for fetching traffic alerts. It is available in GeoRSS form, so it just drops right in here. This form interface lets you show up to three different locations on the same map.
GeoURL Web Sites near
Premshree Pillai made a GeoRSS transducer for geourl.org which we can display here. Yahoo! News Breaking Stories

Akshay Java
wrote a transducer that turns Yahoo! news items into GeoRSS.


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Golden Gate Sunsets
I made my own GeoRSS map showing the spots from which you can watch the setting sun right in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Miscellany
Premshree Pillai's Hurricane Rita, Joe Crawford's San Diego Bloggers, Jamie Glenn's San Francisco Dog Parks, Asher Blum's Sunnyvale Street Maintenance, potrerohillsf.com's Potrero Hill Robberies, Dirty Harry Movie Locations.
If you have an example you'd like to show off in the list above, just let me know.