Google Maps: Show Me Multiple Locations, Please!

September 20, 2005 4:06 PM

Is there anyway to get Google maps to log multiple locations on a single map?

I'm headed to SF next week for a conference that will be hectic and have me in multiple locations in roughly the same neighborhood each day/night. I'd love to be able to produce a map that had that cute little Google pinpoint for each of the events in a give day. Is there anyway to do this online?

(And while I really like the clean look of Google maps, if there's another service that can do this, I'm all ears)

posted by donovan to technology (5 comments total)

With a little bit of work (XML editing and Greasemonkey scripts), you can do it yourself. Here's how.
posted by pmbuko at 4:19 PM on September 20, 2005

A few more answers to this question here and here. I was looking for something a bit on the simpler side personally, but let me know if you make this work for you.
posted by jessamyn at 4:36 PM on September 20, 2005

Thanks for the pointers--I'll admit to being a freerider here as the option of simply printing a map and taking a Sharpie to it will take me all of 10 min . . . was hoping that somebody had created a hack that would help me do this w/o inhaling marker fumes. And of course would be badass.
posted by donovan at 10:23 PM on September 20, 2005

I suggested gmaptrack in one of the threads that jessamyn links. In the mean time, I've played tagzania and prefer it for several reasons. For one, it has tags.

More recently, I tried communitywalk and think that it would be better for certain purposes. It numbers each map marker which is a feature that I've been looking for. It also has a community feature which allows comments. And it incorporates directions which I haven't seen in any of the other google maps sites.
posted by stuart_s at 10:32 PM on September 20, 2005

So... since you did open yourself to "other products", I should mention that MSN's Virtual Earth can actually do this quite well. They have good resolution images, and they are well integrated with the search component and the "scratchpad" function, which is great for saving searched items and mapped items in the URL itself.

When you add several searched items or explicit addresses (type the address into the "Where" box to find an exact address on the map) you can add them to the scratchpad. Then, click the permalink up in the top right and you'll get a full URL with the locations/searches embedded in it. Here's an example of three spots mapped by address, as well as a couple of related searches. Make your own map of places you'll be, and possibly add related searches for local restaurants, bars, coffee houses, whatever. As you can see, the scratch pad items are numbered, which sounds perfect for having a "visual itinerary" for each day.

As much as MS can suck at times (and before we bash MS as a late-comer, let's not forget how long Terraserver has been around, and that MS actually invented some of the technologies involved with AJAX), this is a pretty well made site. It's pretty straightforward and seems to be what you're looking for right out of the box, without another service/site needed.
posted by hincandenza at 2:19 AM on September 21, 2005