A Small Guide to Mapicurious

As we travel around at Mapicurious, we need efficient ways to create maps on the site - and quickly share points of interest.

Here is our guide to how we do it:

1. We have Twitter and Foursquare accounts. We can tweet and checkin from places around the city during our data collection. These geotagged apps simplify collection of known places like restaurants and bars.

2. We use our Around Mapicurious app for iPhone (available on Android as well). This lets us know what we have already mapped. No reason to add duplicate points.

3. What's in our bag today? iPhone 3GS and Garmin Colorado 400t. We take advantage of the lower resolution camera on the iPhone, versus carrying the N95 8GB. For quick mapping, these tools are the best.

4. We use the Foursquare and Twitter mapping methods to get a map, and use our other tools (Garmin and iPhone) to enhance the location data. It can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes to create a complete map.

5. Once in Mapicurious, we can easily expose our map data to:

a. The Mapicurious.com site.
b. Google Earth for detailed analysis.
c. Our Garmin nuvi for road trips.
d. GeoRSS to add into a few random GPSes we have laying around the place. (Sometimes we get bored too.)
e. Layar AR browsing app on the iPhone.
f. OpenStreetMap because we see value participating in the larger geo community.

And now you know.

Maps