Late night tech post

Since when has 10PM become late night for me? …I can’t pin it down but I know it happened somewhere in the last three or four years. Anyway, today is Tech Tuesday here at Our Chicago Blog and I owe you all a technology related post of some sort. Shana and I discussed it, and we’re aware that Tech Tuesday has the potential to become simply a geekier version of Monday’s theme: Product Endorsement. My thinking is that whether the Tuesday topic ends up being a product,  a service or a perhaps just a concept, it’s still not necessarily an endorsement. With all of that in mind, I’m nonetheless going to write this post about something that could potentially be seen as a product and that I also fairly strongly endorse — Google “My Maps.”

I’ve been doing alot of work with the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API) lately. The Google Maps API is a service made available by Google so that programmers can utilize all of the power of Google Maps on their or their client’s own web site.  I mention this because Google “My Maps” is basically your everyday Joe’s API. Unlike the actual API which requires knowledge of at least three different scripting languages and extensive knowledge of how web services operate, “My Maps” is a simple point and click interface for creating your own customized maps that you can put on your website as “mapplets” or share with the world straight from the Google Maps web site. I could write up a whole big set of instructions here and bore you to death or I could point you now to an excellent video tutorial that demonstrate everything you need to know to get started:

Well, that pretty much says it all… Have fun making maps!