We’ve been playing with GeoRSS at work and I got the challenge of putting the GeoRSS feed we developed into a gadget that users could put on their iGoogle pages or web sites. I can’t show you the one I developed at work because the feed isn’t public (yet), so I developed another one using a publicly available feed (USGS volcanoes). This is a super-simple little gadget that uses Google Maps API and puts a little marker on the earth for each of the GeoRSS news feed items. I wish I had the ability to edit the items because the balloons get kind of big and unweildy inside the little gadget, but that’s beyond my control.
Add it to your iGoogle page.
Add it to your web site.
I’m sure many of you already know all this, but for those that don’t:
What’s GeoRSS? It’s a location-aware news feed. There are many types of GeoRSS feeds: homes for sale, USGS Earthquakes, flickr location-tagged photos, etc. I can imagine so many more excellent applications for it–how about best fishing holes, animal migration patterns, disease monitoring, best places to drink beer, …
What’s a gadget? If you haven’t customized your Google page yet, you are missing out! Google allows you to add handy little gadgets (mini-web applications) that give you everything from the weather to the image of the day to google map search or e-mail in a small, compact little package so you can fit lots of them on your page, and move them around wherever you want them.
The whole thing takes about 30 minutes to put together, and then a bit of tweaking and testing. The best part is it doesn’t require any programming! Just a little HTML and some XML.
USGS also has an Earth as Art gadget I helped with. This was my first experience developing a gadget: no geographic context, but it’s a lot prettier.
World of Usability 