Bloggers get on the Map !

Do you like Google Maps ? They released their API's towards the end of last week, and I decided to take it for a spin over the weekend. Here is the result. May interest some of you.

I basically took a partial list of Bloggers from the MBA league website and plotted them onto the US map. If you want to zoom in, i would recommend you click on the icon and leave the box that pops up in place. That way it always remains in the frame - doesn't auto center as yet.

You might also notice certain schools with active bloggers missing. It's quite funny actually - they are not there because I can't find a map-able address for them ! Here are the contact pages for the missing schools:

http://www.hbs.edu/about/contact.html
http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/site/contacts
www.johnson.cornell.edu/directory
mba.ncsu.edu/contact.html
www.dartmouth.edu/tuck/contact.htm

All of them have a mailing address with PO Boxes, or building names. I realized as I was trying to find their latitude/longitude co-ordinates that the geocoding website I was using can only map US street addresses !

I find it quite instructive actually. It is, albeit on an insignificant scale, a demonstration of why new/disruptive technologies can be so disconcerting. They force you to think different. Who, at one of these schools, would have thunk of providing a street address so that one could map it on an online map? How long before websites start publishing the lat/lng co-ords of, say, their physical presence so that hackers everywhere can easily integrate these into their google maps projects?

PS: Of special interest to Chicago bloggers - our beloved Hyde Park Center is missing ! Looks like the picture Google's using is from sometime between demolition of the older building and construction of the new one. Unless they know something we don't :-)