A Million Thoughts

Embed Google Streetview

2008-10-09T16:11:11Z

Today I read about new cities where Google Streetview is available. At the bottom of this article, there is something about a new feature:

According to Boston.com, “Google is also introducing a mashup service today that will enable Internet users to import Street View panoramas from particular streets or neighborhoods to their own websites or blogs. The service is intended to make it easier for people to use Street View to recommend sights, locate coffee shops, or design cyber-walking tours.” More likely, Google will just extend the embedding feature to Street View imagery.

I couldn’t find more information about this new feature, so I decided to test it…..and it works. Just use the normal link to this page option when viewing the streetview. Past the HTML into your own page (or click on customize to change some settings for the embedded map) and here’s the result:

View Larger Map

This is a very nice new feature, I can think of all kinds of uses for this, eg you can display the area of your hotel, apartment, company, create a preview of your next holiday, etc.

update: feature has been officially launched on the Lat Long Blog

Google AJAX API loader

2007-08-18T06:03:27Z

Today I was going to the Google Maps API documentation and after using it for a while, my eye was caught by this:

It’s maybe a bit difficult to read from the above image, but it says:

The Google Maps API is now integrated with the Google AJAX API loader…

I couldn’t remember seeing this before, so besides clicking on the link, I googled “Google AJAX API loader”. I found out it’s a very new way of using multiple Google javascript APIs on the same page.

The main purpose for the loader is to unify namespaces across the different APIs on one page and to have only one script tag instead of separate script tags for each of the APIs you wanna use on your page.

At this moment there are 3 Google AJAX APIs:

Before the API loader you had to write a seperate <script> tag for each of these APIs you were going to use on your page, like this:


<--Loading the Maps API -->
<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&key=abcdefg"
       type="text/javascript">
</script>
<--Loading the Search API -->
<script src="src="http://www.google.com/uds/api?file=uds.js&v=1.0"
       type="text/javascript"">
</script>
<--Loading the Feed API -->
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOUR_KEY_HERE"
       type="text/javascript">
</script>


With the new loader in place it looks a lot more cleaner:


<--Use the Loader -->
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=ABCDEFG"
       type="text/javascript">
</script>
<--Load the APIs -->
<script type="text/javascript">
  google.load("maps", "2");
  google.load("search", "1");
  google.load("feeds", "1");
</script>



The second parameter of the 'load' call is the version you'd like to use of this API. So the above example loads version 2 of the Maps API, version 1 of the AJAX Search API and also version 1 of the AJAX Feeds API.
Apparently the AJAX Feed API was already using this way to load the API and now you can use it for all 3 of the Google's AJAX APIs. 
Example
Here's a complete example from the documentation:


<html>
  <head>
    <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=ABCDEFG"
type="text/javascript"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
      google.load("maps", "2");
      google.load("search", "1");

      // Call this function when the page has been loaded
      function initialize() {
        var map = new google.maps.Map2(document.getElementById("map"));
        map.setCenter(new google.maps.LatLng(37.4419, -122.1419), 13);

        var searchControl = new google.search.SearchControl();
        searchControl.addSearcher(new google.search.WebSearch());
        searchControl.addSearcher(new google.search.NewsSearch());
        searchControl.draw(document.getElementById("searchcontrol"));
      }
      google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize);
    </script>

  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="map" style="width: 200px; height: 200px"></div>
    <div id="searchcontrol"></div>
  </body>
</html>



Here you can see, it's not only about loading the APIs, but you can also initialize them in one method and use the google.setOnLoadCallback method to call the init method once the document loads.
Namespace and migrating
Google now uses a different namespace for each of the APIs. Instead of the G* naming scheme, you can now use the new scheme "google.*". For the Maps API this will be "google.maps.*". 
Both naming schemes will coexists, so you can make your own choice if you're going to use the new one. I think for new projects it would be wise to start using the new scheme, especially if you're using more than 1 API on a page. 
Google says they will continue to update and maintain both schemes, so at this moment there's no need to migrate your older code.



Migrated to Wordpress
2007-07-27T23:10:54Z
As of today this blog doesn’t run on my home-made-blogging software anymore. Instead it uses Wordpress. 
When I started this blog, I thought it would be a nice experience to build my own blogging system. And it was, but….after I build the basic blogging system, I wanted to add more features, eg. comments, pingbacks, etc.  After a while I realized I didn’t had time (or didn’t make time) to add these features, so I started looking for another solution. 
I heard and saw a lot of good things about Wordpress, but it uses PHP, a language I never really looked into. But I was getting more and more enthusiastic about Wordpress, so I decided to make the switch.
Last few days I created my own Wordpress theme, so I could use my existing layout. I moved all the data from my old blog, setup mod_rewrite for the old urls and here’s the result. I still have to migrate my Dutch Blog, but that’ll happen somewhere next week.
If you run into dead links or if you’re experiencing any problems on this blog, please let me now. You can use the comments for this, they are working!!!! If you’d like to comment on any of the older articles, please do so.



Laptop crash
2007-07-27T21:16:57Z
Last week my laptop crashed. For a long time several programs were crashing randomly. I didn’t had time to investigate this, but it was becoming a very big problem lately. Firefox was crashing about every 5 minutes. Last week I couldn’t even start Mongrel or Tomcat.
A disk check revealed a lot of problems on file system level. I started to backup everything I could, but some parts were already too much corrupted.
I was afraid it was a hardware problem, but after doing a clean Debian Lenny install everything looks okay. Even my random crashes are gone!
But I’m not completely convinced the problems will be gone away for good, so I’m starting to look for another laptop anyway.
And now I must make a difficult decision: Will my next laptop be Linux based or MacOSX based?



Google is giving away money…
2007-07-27T21:16:33Z
To Gadget developers that is. A few days ago Google announced Google Gadget Ventures, a pilot project for funding third-party Gadget developers.
The Official Google Blog says Google wants to help developers who want to spend more time developing Gadgets and:
Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love—building great Gadgets.
It’s very nice of Google to think about us pour developers, but I don’t think this is the main reason.
Google knows how important the developer community is. Without developers who want to create Gadgets, iGoogle won’t be very popular and people will go to Yahoo, Netvibes or one of the other personalized pages services. I even think there are more Netvibes modules at the moment than there are Google Gadgets. So it’s a very smart move to start awarding developers.
Two different types of funding
Google Gadget Ventures is a pilot project which offers 2 types of funding:

a grant of $5000 for developers who’ve built a gadget that gets at least 250,000 page views per week. You only have to submit a one page proposal how you want to improve the gadget and how you’re gonna use the $5000 to reach that goal.
a seed investment of $100,000 for developers who want to create a business around the Google Gadget platform. You can only apply for this type of funding if you already got the $5000 grant. You also have to submit a business plan about how you plan to build a viable business around the platform.

Other developers?
It’s interesting to see how this is going to evolve. There are many more developers building on top of Google APIs. Will Google start rewarding these also in the future?
Google Maps developers can always use the Google Adsense platform to monetize their Mashups. Some of these days you can even use Adsense ads on your maps.
As a sidenote, there’s also a new product called Lat49 that is supposed to help Maps Mashup developers to make money with their maps by displaying ads within or outside the map. The product isn’t available yet, but according to the Programmableweb blog, they are looking for publishers and advertisers to take part in their current aplha testing.
But what about the things where you can’t use Ads? E.g. Sketchup models of buildings which can be used inside Google Earth, Google Earth mashups or Mapplets? It would be interesting to see if Google starts a funding project for these as well.
In the mean time, I’m gonna think about creating my own Google Gadget. I don’t know what kind of Gadget yet, so any suggestions are welcome  
These are very interesting times for us developers, it’s like Read/WriteWeb wrote:
Conclusion – it’s Christmas for third party developers



Recent Google developments
2007-07-27T21:15:46Z
Just when I didn’t had time to blog, Google decided to announce a series of new developments and features.
It started with the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, where Google announced the Google Street View and Mapplets.
The day after Where 2.0, Google had organized a Developer day in 10 cities around the world, where a lot of developer related stuff was launched.
In this post I’m highlighting some of the new stuff I find interesting, like new Google Maps API features, Mapplets and the Mashup Editor.

Where 2.0
There was a lot of interesting stuff going on at the Where 2.0 conference, but I think the Google Street View got the most press coverage.
Does somebody know if there’s a European equivalent to the Where 2.0 conference, because the US is a little bit too far for me just to attend a conference.
I asked Gina Blaber, O’Reilly’s Conference Director, if O’Reilly is ever going to organize such an event in Europe, just like they organized the euroOSCON conference last 2 years and the upcoming RailsConf in Berlin. She said they would love to organize a euroWhere 2.0, but if it’ll ever happen she couldn’t tell. Maybe we Europeans just have to organize it ourselves  
Google Developer Day
The day after the Where 2.0 conference, Google organized a Developer Day in 10 different countries. Sadly not in the Netherlands, because they already organized one last March in Amsterdam. But the Amsterdam day wasn’t as technical and as interesting as these events. Maybe next time.
Mapplets
I think Mapplets are the most important new feature Google announced recently. Street View got the most attention, but I think mapplets will be a lot more useful than Street View.
The most important difference between Google Maps and Google Earth were the layers in Google Earth. Users can decide which layers they turn on or of. On maps.google.com you get to see everything or just the kml overlay you were viewing. With Mapplets you can create layers for maps.google.com.
This way users can combine different layers to search for information. For example, you are looking for a new house, with schools and public transport in the neighborhood. You enable the housing mapplet, the school mapplet and the public transport mapplet. You get all the information you need on one map.
A similar example can be seen in the demo from Google:

I haven’t had time to dive into the documentation and try to create my own mapplets, but I’m going to do so and when I do, I’ll write another episode in my series about How to get information into Google Maps, because this is a great new way to add your information into Google Maps.
Mashup editor
The Mashup editor is a new tool created by Google. At this moment it’s a limited test and you have to sign up and wait to get access.
I already got access and played a little bit with the editor. It looks a lot more developer oriented than Yahoo Pipes. You get a text editor where you can use Google Tags to create your mashup. It also uses a subset of XPath. It is very easy to create a map from a GeoRSS feed, or a mashup of a GData feed.
I found a few limitations, eg. you can only create filters on GData feeds. But there’s Yahoo Pipes! You can use Pipes to filter your RSS feeds and create a new feed and use the Mashup editor to create a nice mashup with this feed. Pipes an the Mashup editor are complementary.
I will write a thorough review of the Editor, but until then, you can take a tour of the editor or see a few examples created with the Mashup editor.
Google Maps API changes
There have been a lot of API changes lately, but the biggest new API feature is the addition of the directions API . In a lot of countries (currently Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States) you can use this API to get driving directions.
Another new feature is the possibility to add traffic overlays on top of your map. This feature is only available in the US.
The Open Source Utility Library also got an interesting new extenstion, the DragZoomControl. You can use this in your map to give the users the ability to drag a  rectangle on the map to zoom in to the bounds of that rectangle.
Google Maps and Adsense
Google also announced they are going to give developers of Google Maps the ability to monetize their Maps by adding Adsense ads to Maps. They didn’t specify a date when this will be launched, but I heard something about late June.
I’m also not sure whether this will only be made available on Mapplets, or also on Maps created on your own webpages. I’ll try to get more information, and write a separate article about this.
update: Pamela from Google confirmed AdSense will be made available through the Google Maps API, so every Google Maps developer can use it. You can also see Brandon Badger announce the AdSense Maps API (the announcement starts around 30 minutes in the video).
And more…..
Other new things that were launched are:

Google Gears, an Open Source library to create off line web applications. Very nice, I wonder how this fits in the Firefox 3 off line mechanism.  I think it’s great Google released the library as Open Source. There are already non-Google Webapps who started using it.
Street View, high quality street images on maps.google.com. At this moment only available in a few major cities in the US. I wonder whether Google can make this available for all major cities around the world. The first discussions about privacy issues are already showing up, but also the first blogs who are indexing the most interesting, funny, strange Street Views.
New Youtube APIs, these aren’t released yet, but there was an announcement that new APIs will be made available shortly. These new APIs will be GData based. You can watch the video of the presentation for more about the present and the new APIs.

Summary
How many announcements can a company make in such a short period and how can a developer cope with all these new exiting things that can be used?  
The future will tell how successful all the new Google features and tools will be. Next few weeks I’ll experiment with some of the new features and decide which onces I’m gonna use, so stay tuned for more information and in the mean time you can watch most of the presentations of the Google Developers Day in the Google Developer Day Channel at Youtube.



How to get your information into Google Maps (7): Coupons
2007-07-27T21:15:20Z
Besides the ways to add information into Google Maps I wrote about in this series, the businesses in the US have one extra option. They can add Coupons to their Maps listing. In this article you can read more about what Coupons are and how they can be created.
What are Coupons?
Coupons are printable forms, which can be used by businesses to give their customers discounts. Here’s an example:

There are many sites available where you can download and/or print free coupons.   In Google Maps a link to the coupons will show up in the search results.

Last year Google partnered with Valpak, a direct marketing company in North America. They started with about 20.000 coupons from Valpak. After the initial release of the Coupons feature more coupons would be added both through Valpak and the Local Business Center.
How can Coupons be created?
I thought there was only one method to create your own coupons, but I think I found another one, more about that one later on.
Business owners in the US can go to their Local Business Center and click on the Coupons tab .

When you click on the Add a coupon now button, you’ll get a form with which you can add your own coupon.

When you start filling out the form, there’s a live preview of the coupon at the right side of the page. The fields are self-explaining. The fields are a little bit small (25 characters for the headline, 35 for the sub-heading, etc), so you have to be creative with texts. You also have the option to give an expiration date to the coupon.
After you’ve clicked on ‘Continue’, the coupon will show up on the detailed page for your listing in Google Maps within a few minutes.

You can edit the Coupons from this overview, but you can also delete or pause them.
Google Coupon Feed
When I started doing some research for this article, I ran into the Google Coupon Feed Documentation.
It looks like this is a way to add a complete list of coupons at once. You have to create an xml feed (or a tsv feed) on your own server. The documentation doesn’t mention how Google will find this feed. Can you submit the url somewhere? Do you need to add it to your sitemap? I asked Google about this, but I haven’t had an answer yet. If I hear from them, I’ll post an update. If you know more about this subject, please let me know
I also couldn’t find any information about the Coupon feeds, except the documentation on code.google.com.
Coupons availability
At this moment the Coupons option is only available in the US, but I’m not sure how many companies are using it.
The initial 20.000 looks like a lot, but I had to perform a couple of searches before I could find one.
Maybe if the coupons start showing up in the ‘normal’ Google search results, more companies will start creating them.
It would also be nice if the feature would be made available in more countries. And if you don’t need to print out the coupons, but just use them on your mobile, like Cellfire offers.
At this moment it’s not possible to search for coupons, that’s a pity.
But for local companies in the States it’s nice to start experimenting with Coupons. It’s free and it gives you an extra option to connect to your customers.
This was the last ‘normal’ article in the series about How to get your information into Google Maps
There will be one more, this will be a wrap up of the series.



How to get your information into Google Maps (6): User generated data
2007-07-27T21:15:05Z
If you want to publish information into Google Maps that isn’t a business location, you cannot use the Local Business Center, or the local ads option. You could use local AdWords ads, but that won’t display your information on the map.
Another way of adding information into Google Maps is by creating your own data sources. There are a few different ways of doing this and this article shows you how.
KML
All solutions are based on the fact that Google started indexing KML files. The exact moment they started doing this is unknown, but the first public announcement was begin this year when Google started encouraging users to create KML files and link these in their sitemaps.
After this KML support was showing up everywhere:

KML search in Google Earth.
KML and GeoRSS Support Added to the Google Maps API

And the latest news about KML support was last month, when Google announced MyMaps.  The biggest news in this announcement wasn’t about creating your own maps, but about searching user generated content:
The user-created results include KML as well as maps made through My Maps.
All KML files Google finds when crawling the web, can be searched from Google Maps! So it’s interesting to find out how you can create your own KML files.
Manually
Because KML is ‘just’ an xml format, you could create it with a normal text or xml editor.
Here’s a very simple example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.1">
  <Placemark>
    <name>Million Pieces</name>
    <description>This is my location</description>
    <Point>
      <coordinates>
        4.99941388888889,52.35555555555555,0
      </coordinates>
    </Point>
  </Placemark>
</kml>

You could use this option for one location or maybe a few locations. But if you need to add more locations, or if you want to use more advanced KML-features, it’s better to use one of the other options.
Google Earth
Google Earth is all about KML. The name, ‘Keyhole Markup Language’ refers to the Keyhole company which originally created the Google Earth application (name of the application was Keyhole). Most of the data used in Google Earth is stored as KML. This includes the default layers, the layers you can download from the internet.
Besides viewing KML files, it’s also very easy to create your own KML files with Google Earth.
First start the program and go to a place you want to mark. You can find a place by manually searching the globe using your mouse, you can search for an address using the ‘fly to’ option or you can find a business location by using the ‘find business’ option.
If you found the correct location, use the ‘add placemark’ button from the toolbar.

In the window you’ll get next, you can add the the name and description for the marker. You can also change some other properties, eg color of the icon and the color of the label.

The same way you can also add polygons, paths and image overlays.
When you’re finished, you can save the marker by right clicking on the location in My Places and select ‘save as’. This file needs to be placed somewhere on a webserver, but more about this later on in this article.
If you want to create a kml file which contains multiple markers, overlays, polygons, etc you’d better start by creating a folder under ‘My Places’. Place all the markers in this folder and select ‘save as’ on the folder.
Google MyMaps
About a month ago Google announced the MyMaps feature.
This feature allows users to create custom maps. But even more important, every created map is accessible as a kml file and is also being indexed by Google. So your maps can show up in the search result of a Google Maps search.
To create your own map, you’ll need an Google account. If you have one go to maps.google.com. If you don’t have a Google account you can also use this link, here you’ll find more information about creating an account.
On the homepage of Google Maps, there’s tab named ‘My Maps’, it’s next to the ‘Search Results’ tab.

Here you can create a new map and give it a title and description. You can also make it public or unlisted. Public maps will be included in the search results on Google Maps (and Google Earth).

You can add placemarkers, lines and shapes to your newly created map and give these a title and description. The description can be normal text, but also html. It’s even possible to include flash videos.

Save your map and you’re done. The map will be automatically indexed by Google.
Mashup
This is a completely different approach than the onces discussed before.
You can use the Google Maps API to create your own Mashup.
Google Maps mashups are a great way of adding information on a map to your own website. If you have location related information stored in a database it’s easy to publish on a map with the Google Maps API, but it’s also not too difficult to create a KML file with the same information. This way you can make sure the information is not only displayed on your own website, but it’ll also be indexed by Google. How Google finds your kml file? Keep on reading.
Sitemap
A sitemap is an xml file¹ which contains a list of pages that are available on a website for crawling. It is a list of urls with some metadata about the urls (change frequency, last modified, etc).
Sitemaps are supported by all major search engines and are even auto discoverable. Just upload the file to your server, add the location to your robots.txt and the crawlers will find it.
If you have a kml file you can upload it to your website and add the url to your sitemap, like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://millionpieces.nl/mylocations.kml</loc>
      <lastmod>2007-05-10</lastmod>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
</urlset>

Next time Google downloads your sitemap file, the KML file wil also be scheduled for indexing.
Future
At this moment Google is the only search engine that indexes KML files. Maybe in the  future others will follow (especially those with their own local search or maps).
At this moment KML is the only geo related format Google indexes, at least that I’m aware of. The Google Maps API and the Google Maps website also support the GeoRSS format. GeoRSS information can be displayed on the Google Maps website and on your own Mashups by using the Google Maps API, so it’s not unthinkable Google will start indexing these also.
This was supposed to be the last article in the series about how to get your information into Google Maps, but I think I’ll write 2 more. The next one will be about Coupons and the last one will be a summary of all articles.
If you have any questions or comments, you can use the feedback form on the contact page (comments will be enabled very soon!).
¹ It can also be a text file, but the features of a text file are limited



How to get your information into Google Maps (5): Local Ads
2007-07-27T21:14:48Z
After using the information of the previous article about the Local Business Center, you discovered when searching on Google Maps you’re just one of the several hundred companies in the search results. You start wondering how this can be changed, how can you make sure people will notice your company. That’s where the local business ads feature becomes useful.
First a note. I wanted to test the Local ads before writing about it. Unfortunately I don’t have a campaign suitable for local ads at the moment. All information found in this article is from research I’ve done. When I do have a local campaign running, I’ll probably write a follow up.
What is a local business ad?
From the Google AdWords FAQ:
“Local business ads are AdWords ads associated with a specific geographical location.”
There are 2 different types of local ads:

Local AdWords Ads – These are just like normal AdWords ads, but targeted geographically. These will be shown next to the search results on Google Maps as ‘sponsored links’.
Local business ads – These are ads which will also be shown next to the search results, but they also includes a map component.

Local Adwords Ads
There are two places where local ads can be displayed. The first one is at the top of the Google Maps search results:

The maximum number of ads displayed at this location is 1.
The second location where local ads can be displayed is at the bottom of the search results:

There’s a maximum of 3 ads displayed here.
These types of ads could also show up in the normal Google search results as sponsored links. However using the same keywords on Google Maps as on the websearch doesn’t result in the same sponsored links. More about this later on in ‘When will ads be displayed’.
Local Business Ads
These kind of ads can also show up at the top or bottom of the search results, but there’s a major difference. When you click on a normal sponsored link you’ll go to a website. When you click on a local business ad you’ll get an info window on the map.
This info window displays a title (name of the company), max 2 text lines, phone number, url, address info and even an image.
The text lines and the image are the only things you can add when creating the ad, the rest of the information is the same as your business information in Google Maps.

As you can see, the marker icon on the map is different from the normal search results markers. You can use your own icon when creating your Local Business ad.
Google only charges you when people click on the link to your website. You don’t have to pay when people are viewing the info balloon.
The local business ads can also show up in the normal web search results. When they do they will almost look the same as they do on Google Maps. The only differences: there’s no image included and the city of your business will also be displayed.
There are two more places where text version of local business ads may appear.
The first one is with relevant searches on the mobile version of Google Maps. Because there’s not much space on a mobile screen, the ad only contains two lines of text, so the ads are shortened. At this moment you’re not charged when people view or click on your ads on Google Maps for Mobile!
The second one is on Google SMS queries. The space in SMS messages is very limited, so the local business ads will also be shortened (Business name and contact info will always be included).
How to create?
There are a few requirements for creating local business ads:

You must have a Google Maps business listing
Your business must be located in United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, or Spain (others will follow).
You must have an AdWords account

For a complete overview of the requirements see the Google AdWords Help Center.
If you want to create a local AdWords campaign, there’s a great lesson in the Google AdWords Learning Center: Language & Location Targeting
When will ads be displayed?
The answer to this question depends on whether you’re searching Google Maps or searching the web.
On Google Maps ads will be displayed when a user submits a search query for a specific geographical area (when there are ads for this area). For local business ads this means the businesses must be located in that area. For local AdWords ads this means there must be a geographically targeted campaign. The user’s IP address isn’t used by the algorithm to decide which ads must be displayed.
On Google’s websearch the user’s IP address is used by the algorithm. A text-only version of the local business ad will show up when the user’s IP address is located near your business. Of course the search query must also contain relevant keywords to your business ad.
If a users uses the name of a city in the query, the IP address isn’t used and ads wil be displayed that are relevant to the city the user searches for. More information about this subjects can be found in the AdWords Help Center.
If you want to test whether your ads are showing in other geographical locations you can use the adpreview tool. Read more about the parameters you can use  for testing your ads.
Conclusion
Geographically targeted AdWords campaigns are well known, but the local business ads are relatively unknown, eg I never saw one in the Dutch version of Google Maps.
It’s a great option for companies with physical locations, eg. hotels, restaurants, car sales companies, etc.
Companies who don’t have a physical location, can use geographically targeted AdWords. This way they can still have ads running on Google Maps.
Next episode in this series will be about user (or company) generated content and Google Maps.



How to get your information into Google Maps: Update
2007-07-27T21:14:26Z
For those of you who are waiting for the next installment in the How to get your information into Google Maps series, here’s a quick update.
Writing the last two articles about Local Ads and User Generated Content is taking longer than I thought it would take. Especially the one about Local Ads.
The local features of Adwords are difficult to test just for the sake of an article, without running a real campaign.
So keep your eyes posted on this blog, next week the last 2 articles will be published.
In the mean time, if you’re Dutch, you may wanna check out the Dutch version of this series. It’s not just a translated version, but it will also be adapted to the Dutch Google Maps (if possible and needed).