I heard a number of people talking about Atlas this weekend at BarCamp, so I did some investigation yesterday and thought of an interesting application of this free tool for podcasters.
For those of you who don’t know (as I didn’t), Atlas is a tool created by Faneuil Media that makes it easy to add your own information to a Google map. It’s in open alpha testing right now, but it seems to work alright for simple stuff and is quite easy to use.
I immediately thought of mapping all of the shows I have done for Boston Behind the Scenes for use on that site. The process was pretty simple (including adding links and show notes to the map points), and I’ve put the result up as an experiment. I’d appreciate it if a few of you would go look at it and tell me if it adds anything to the site.
I like it because it gives a visitor an immediate feel for the fact that I go all over the city talking to people. This might not apply to everyone’s show (e.g. you always talk about the same locations), but if it does, I’d encourage checking it out.
Other promising features include the ability to have your listeners add their own points to the map, either through an administrator-moderated process or in a more free-for-all wiki fashion.
Google maps have been showing up in more and more places lately, and now the tools exist to integrate them into your projects without learning the nitty-gritty details of the Google system.