Victims of the Holocaust

Since 1997 German artist Gunter Demnig has been creating memorials for individual victims of the Holocaust. Demnig's stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) are small, cobblestone-sized memorials for individual victims of Nazism.

Each stolperstein is placed in the sidewalk outside the victim's home. Stolpersteine Online is a Google Map of the memorials that have been erected. The project has created about 35,000 stumbling blocks so far. This is a very small percentage of the total number of victims of the Holocaust, however if you zoom in on any German city on this map you still can't be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Nazis Holocaust.

I'll Name that Mountain in One

Street View Quiz is a series of quiz questions based on Google Maps Street View.

In each quiz question you are presented with a Street View and then have to answer a question related to the view presented. The questions might ask you to name something seen in the Street View or you could get a more general question about something that happened at the location.

Street View Quiz includes a simple interface that allows users to create their own questions by providing a link to a Street View and submitting the question and answer.


GeoGuessr is a Street View geography quiz that sets you the challenge of guessing the locations of a series of random Street View images. Using visual clues, such as the fauna, landscape and street furniture you have to place a pin on a global Google Map indicating where you think each Street View image was taken.

The closer your guess to the actual location then the more points you win.


Locatestreet is a very similar game that presents a series of random Street Views and the player has to guess the country where the image was captured.

The featured terrain, architecture, street furniture and modes of transport all provide clues that can help the player guess the country of origin of the random Street View image. The game also includes three clues for each image, but be warned - if you use a clue you will win less points.

Street View from Moore, Oklahoma

The New York Times have created two evocative custom Street View images of the devastion caused by the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma -Before and After: 360° Views From Moore.

The custom Street Views were captured on Tuesday and have been synced with the Google Maps Street Views that were captured in December 2007. If you pan either Street View both the before and after image moves so you can compare the images around the whole 360 degrees.

The Times captured two custom Street View images, one at South Avery Drive, between Southeast 4th and 8th Street, and the other at Southeast 4th Street and Heatherwood Drive.

The Polygon Masking Wizard

I've long been a fan of Vasile Cotovanu's polygon masking effect that allows you to highlight a particular area on Google Maps. Vasile has now released a wizard app that can quickly create the GeoJSON, KML, or Google Maps API polygon code needed to create your own polygon mask.


Geomask allows you to simply draw around an area on Google Maps and just press a button to generate the polygon to create this neat masking effect. You aren't even restricted to one area and you can highlight as many areas as you want on the map.

The tool is really easy to use. I created a polygon mask to highlight the London Olympic Park and then created a map with the mask in under two minutes using Geomask (you can see the result in the screenshot at the top of the post).

Using a polygon mask is a very effective way to highlight a specific area on a Google Map. Here are a couple of Google Maps applications that have used a similar polygon masking effect to highlight regions on the map.


Der Bayerischer Wald is a great Google Maps guide to hiking routes, accommodation and events in the Bavarian Forest region in Germany.


Ourense en Verde is using the Google Maps API to map the natural beauty of the Ourense region in Galicia, Spain.

Finding Food Trucks with Google Maps

Street Food App is a desktop, iOS and Android app for finding food trucks in a number of US and Canadian cities.

Currently the Street Food App can help you find nearby food trucks in Boston, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Columbus and Victoria. Each city includes an option to view the current location of the food trucks on a Google Map.

Each truck is displayed on the map with a green or red map marker, green markers indicate the trucks currently open for businesses and the red markers indicate that they are currently closed. Users can click on each food truck on the map to view a small review and the truck's hours of business.

Also See

Tweat It - Google Map of food vendors in New York
Food Truck Maps - tracking food trucks in Los Angeles
truXmap - real-time location map of food trucks in Los Angeles

20 More Museums Added to Google Art

The Google Art Project is an amazing collection of museums, art galleries and works of art that can all be viewed with Google Maps Street View.

Today Google has added 20 more museums, 1,500 new high-resolution artworks and 16 Gigapixel images to the project. The Gigapixel images include “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. The new museums include the Fondation Beyeler Museum in Switzerland and the Monastery of St. John the Theologian on the Greek island of Patmos

The Many Faces of Google Maps

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that leads us to see familiar objects in random patterns. For example, when we look at aerial imagery of the Earth we might think we recognise faces in the topography.

onformative has created a computer program, called GoogleFaces, that scans Google Maps satellite imagery looking for patterns that humans might believe are human faces. GoogleFaces scans through one satellite image after another on Google Maps, sequentially along the latitude and longitude of the globe. After scanning around the world it then switches to the next zoom level and starts all over again.

As it scans each satellite imagery the GoogleFaces face detection algorithm records the latitude and longitude of any 'faces' it finds. The onformative website has a few examples of the faces already found on Google Maps, including the one above, found in the satellite imagery of Russia.

Tech Maps Around the World

Companies Near Me is a Google Map of tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The map includes options to filter the companies displayed on the map by location and by sector. The map is primarily focused on the San Francisco Bay Area but the developers say that they have plans to expand the site to include other tech hubs such as New York, Los Angeles and Boston.


Made in NI is a Google Map of Northern Ireland's start-up's, tech companies and co-working spaces.

Tech maps for individual cities are now being created for many locations around the world. However we don't often see attempts to map entire countries / provinces. Made in NI is a nice attempt to map all of Northern Ireland's burgeoning technology companies.

As well as mapping individual companies, Made in NI also maps wi-fi spots, code clubs and learning spaces.

Also See

Represent Map - a map of tech maps created around the world using the RepresentMap platform

Made in NY  - New York's digital industry mapped
Represent.la - a Google Map of the burgeoning tech scene in Los Angeles

Tech Britain - UK tech map
Tech City Map - map of the technology companies and startups in east London
Cambridge Cluster Map - Cambridge's high-tech sector

Madri+d Mapa del Conocimiento - a Google Map of Madrid's research, technology and science companies.

Mapping Newspaper Text

Mapping Texts is a Google Map from Stanford University that plots the language patterns embedded in 232,567 pages of historical Texas newspaper.

The app analyses the language patterns found in Texas newspapers from 1829-2008. Using a timeline slider tool you can select any date range and, using the map, you can select from a number of locations in Texas. The results of each search are then displayed below the map.

The results show the most common words (word counts), named entities (people, places, etc), and highly correlated words (topic models). The results can be viewed in list view or you can view the results as a word cloud.

Climbing Pic d'Anie on Google Maps

Climbing Pic d'Anie is another Neatline interactive map. This Google Map displays a series of photographs taken during an ascent of Pic d'Anie in the Pyrenees.

The map displays the route of the climb from the nearby small hamlet of Lescun to the summit. Photographs are indicated on the map by a small blue dot and a thin line. The line shows the direction of the viewpoint in each photo and a rough approximation of the photographer’s range of view.