New web application to add contextual mapping to your website

MapMyPage is a new web application that allows you to add contextual map information for any locations mentioned on your web page.

An explanation of how it works is on the site:

MapMyPage uses its own proprietary technology in combination with MetaCarta's GeoTagger and the Google Maps API to identify locations in web pages and display corresponding maps. MapMyPage also provides hyperlinks to relevant content with every map including directions from Google Maps, bird's-eye views from Google Earth, photos from Panaramio, weather from Weather Underground, articles from Wikipedia, news from Google News, events from Zvents, concerts from Gruvr, activities from Viator, trips from Kayak, travel books from Amazon, travel information from WikiTravel, real estate listings from PropSmart, jobs from Indeed, classifieds from Oodle, web search results from Google, blogs from Google Blog Search, videos from YouTube, radio stations from Radio-Locator, TV listings from Yahoo TV, gifts from CafePress, and auctions from eBay.

A comment on AllPointsBlog points out that this feature is available in Internet Explorer 8 which is all well and good, but I use Firefox and I'm sure many other people use different browsers to IE8. A simple web app, that can be customised and coded into pages, has to be the way to go for allowing people to incorporate the functionality into their own content.

So does it actually work?

Well, let's try a few examples and see what comes up:

In my life I have visited Exeter, London, Nottingham and Devon but I have never been to Bangor in Wales or Bangor in Northern Ireland.

In this simple test it has worked fairly well with straightforward towns/cities of a reasonable size.

A number of usability issues around the small size of the pop-up window and having all of those text links squashed into the pop-up bubble. It also took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the map window as well (you simply click outside the window!).

For Nottingham, the initial view is much too zoomed in and I had to zoom out to check that I was actually looking at Nottingham.

Exeter worked much better in this respect and London was generally ok although a few times the zoom level was different and a small number of times I clicked on London the image on the right popped up.

Not really what I would expect of a map depicting the location of London!

Countries suffer from a similar problem with Wales and Northern Ireland represented by a point somewhere near the middle of the country - but the map so zoomed in that it's hard to make out where you are.

Devon, a county in the South West of England, didn't even trigger a response from the application.

Using Bangor was a bit like asking a trick question - although it does highlight one of the common problems with simple geo-tagging solutions like this... many places have the same name. This is how wikipedia copes with the problem. Using MapMyPage the Northern Ireland instance appears and the Welsh option, and others, are ignored.

I also experienced a number of broken links or links to un-related content when clicking on the items in the pop-up for the country items. Exeter however, a decent sized and uniquely named (in the UK at least) city, proved much more successful in providing relevant content.


So, in my brief look so far (and it has been a brief look) I think the idea behind this is really quite cool and I'd love to see it developed and improved further, but definitely some work to do around the design/usability of the map widget and in finding solutions to some of the more complex issues of geotagging and referencing location data.