Much Ado About Mapping

If your recent vernacular includes “mash-ups”, “ajax”, and “2.0″, you’re probably a fan boy of the new .com erection. Thus far, the “new web” is more theory than practice, but the possibilities for new marketing stategies, while boundless, can at once be experimental, reckless, *and* highly successful.

One area that should be on your radar is the wild success of Google’s cartographic endeavors. Following Google’s acquisition of Keynote’s satellite imagery, those clever Bay Area geeks in white lab coats put together, and released for free, the dominant map service on the Internet, Google Maps. Shortly afterward, they released another milestone with the release of Google Earth, an application which allows you to log various points on the earth, push a button, sit back, smoke a joint, and watch the astronaut simulation spin you around till you’re so dizzy your regurgitating your space food in between the cushions.

This was all in good fun, but we’re not talking about fun here we’re talking about marketing potential. And that is where the most significant detail begs introduction. Following Google Earth’s launch, Google announced an API (Application Programming Interface) to Google Maps. The gist of this means, Google created a means by which you could mark points on the map, arranged however you wished, with whatever content you wanted, whether it was a list of the best parrakeet salesmen in Nebraska or the most serviceable nannies this side of Nantucket, Google was happy to help.

So in the year since this API went live, the quantity of GMaps experiments has been remarkable, but the quality has varied wildly. Google Maps Mania, a blog regularly updated with links to the notables, is a good place to start for those wondering what all the fuss is about. Some of the recent entries include:

• geobirds.com – where you can scan through a list of your favorite feathered friends and the likelihood you’ll see them on the trip to the mailbox this afternoon.
• Canadian Election 2006 Mashup – where you can catch a glimpse of how Canada will swing tomorrow
• pintsearch.com – a candid catalog of where best to lift your glass in London.

None of these three are separate from the inclinations of the market. For the first, imagine if you were a tourism operator of birding tours in Wyoming. For the second, imagine if you were a campaign strategist. The third is even more obvious: imagine if you didn’t like the color of your competitor’s bar stools and wanted the world to know about it.

As socially-driven cartography grows, so will the importance of our awareness of its significance. The existance of these mapping tools, created and given away for free, mean the difference between “word of mouth” suggestion and “compassionate salesman” is closer than ever. Who’s going to police the purity of the content? No-one. We’ll have to accept the idea that anything we read on the Internet could have ulterior motivations, just as we’ve come to accept for any other medium. And, from the other end of the spectrum, getting the attention of Internet citizens within your local area has become one step easier.

Is this all much ado about nothing? It’s a familiar debate – the amount of users of Google Maps experiments are still quite small. But they are more curious, patient, and trusting. How much should that pub owner care what’s on the pintsearch.com website? We could only expect that the importance grows, even if it is still relatively small.