The Net Squared in Action section of this site is an inspiring set of profiles written about non-profit inovators and their work with new web tools.  One of those case studies is a mapping tool called Community Walk, a tool that uses Google Maps to alow users to create their own maps of any community of interest or other set of geographic locations.  I thought it would only make sense to use Community Walk in some way regarding the list of groups profiled in the Net Squared case studies.

 

I decided to create a Community Walk map of where all the case study groups are headquartered.  Doing so has been a good learning experience on the pros and cons of doing things like this.  Below are some different views of the map, and here is the link to the full Community Walk page for Net Squared Case Studies.

 

You'll want to visit that page to get an idea of the full functionality of this tool.  Each flagged location is clickable, for example, comments can be left on the map, etc.  The map is supposed to be importable into your own web site, but it doesn't appear to be working for this site right now.  So here's some screen captures: 

 

 

 

First is the section of the world map where all the organizations are headquartered.  It's important to note that a map of where these organizations do their work would look very different, but headquarter locations all being in the Global North so far is interesting too. 

Let's zoom in:

 

On this scale I think you can get a fairly good idea of general US distribution, but obviously some more zooming is in order.

 

 

This zoomed in map of New England shows a great degree of concentration in DC, NY and Boston.  There are some others in Vermont and Maine that you can see from the full page view I cropped here.  It is hard to see for sure how many groups are in any of those cities, due to the overlap of the flags on the map.  We can zoom in to any of the particular cities, or even to any given street in any of the cities, but the level of precision I used in making this map stopped at the city level.  I had trouble using the adress entry means of adding flags and used the click function instead.  If done carefuly, the program should alow you to mark a location down to it's street adress.  

Notes:

These static screen captures don't come close to demonstrating the functionality of Community Walk.  You should really visit this map in particular and the site in general.  If you've never used Google Maps before you can drag the maps around, try zooming in and out, click on the flags, check out the notes and comments.  It's a powerful tool.  My favorite example of Community Walk in use is this map of helicopter landing zones in earthquake shaken Pakistan.  

There are many funtions I didn't take the time to make use of here.  For example, pictures can be inserted with each flag's pop up box and locations can be categorized with any color coded categories you wish to create and assign.  Both of those functions would further aid in the visualization effect.

Left off this map are the groups profiled that are purely web based, without clear geographic headquarters.  I found the locations I did most often through each organization's "contact" page. 

There are a wide variety of Google Maps based visualization tools available.  In a recent interview with computer refurbisher Steve Hargadon  I wrote about another mapping tool called Frappr.  The primary difference between Frappr and Community Walk is that Frappr is built for a whole community to add itself one member at a time to the map.  Community Walk seems best suited to one person creating a map to then sharing with others.  Another similar tool is Wayfaring.com.

The tool that really put this sort of thing "on the map" (if you will) was housingmaps.com, a mash-up of Google Maps and Craig's List housing search.  It's a very impressive tool.

Other related resources include:

CoolGoogleMaps.com A fantastic blog highlighting a new use of Google Maps almost every day.  Wow! 

How to embed Google Maps into your site A good tutorial on the technical aspect of puting maps into your site.

EcmaNaut  A beautiful example of very cutting edge integration of Google Maps.

Del.icio.us tag GoogleMaps  A river of news about Google Maps

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GoogleMaps, mapping, visualization, nptech, CommunityWalk