AP News + Google Maps Mashup
December 9th, 2005
I just finished a simple app that plots the current AP National news stories on top of Google Maps.
The app is a mix of the AP’s National News RSS Feed + Yahoo! Geocoding API + Google Maps.
I have a process running on my server that grabs and parses the AP RSS feed. I parse the location from each story — AP puts a location at the beginning of each story, for example “NEW YORK (AP) — Millions of New Yorkers…“, which is typically city, state or just a city (e.g. “Washington” as in DC). I then convert the location to a latitude/longitude point using the Yahoo! Geocode API. Once that’s done for each of the stories, I write a simple XML file back out to the server — the XML file is basically the RSS file with additional fields for the latitude and longitude of each story. When you load the mashup site in your browser, I use some JavaScript AJAX calls to load, parse and display the stories from the new XML file on the Google Map.
There are typically ten stories in the AP feed and it’s usually updated every 30 minutes to an hour.
It’s a pretty simple app, but I figure it might be useful to some. It was more of a proof of concept than anything. Hopefully my mom can use it in her classroom to help teach the elementary kids about geography + current events…
December 13th, 2005 at 2:58 am
Great stuff!
Where has this been the whole time? Its so clean and useful – a nice way to filter out headlines like which NBA star got arrested (again) and who’s sleeping with Tara Reid (again) – and gets you right to the main stories.
Nice job, engineer at 81nassau.com….
Kim
December 20th, 2005 at 12:24 am
Have not seen anything yet.
December 24th, 2005 at 5:30 pm
Absolutely genious! The potential for such an application is staggering, if a person in the future would be able to choose what RSS-feeds to display, from all over the world.
Wishing everyone Happy Holidays from Sweden!
December 28th, 2005 at 3:27 am
Thank you very much for the nice comments!
I agree that it would be a great application if there was a wider selection of news feeds/sources that covered more of the world. It would make things much easier if the news feeds contained consistent location information.
May 6th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
Your application is very clear and useful.
I am a newbie to blogging and web design and wondered whether you could suggest how it would be possible to: take waypoints recorded by a GPS device from say mountain bike track, overlay these points onto a google map or other map, and, then upload the route onto a blog.
So that friends/family and others can have a richer understanding of where the route is?
Any help would be most appreciated. Great applications once again
Michael
May 22nd, 2006 at 2:14 am
Michael,
Thanks a lot for the comments.
Take a look at either http://www.platial.com/ or http://www.wayfaring.com/ to create your own maps and display those maps on your own blog. There may be others, but I’d start with those…
-Michael.
November 26th, 2006 at 5:03 am
[...] s news. It’s put together by Michael Young. Here’s some information from his weblog where he describes the process. Just to show you how up-to-date I am [...]
March 12th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
[...] le or no labor. And wouldn’t this kind of map make a great site or dashboard widget? More about this map. (For context, Reuter’s news map is more comprehensive, but clunkier and uglier IMHO.) A [...]