1. Skip to navigation
  2. Skip to content
  3. Skip to sidebar

Our Blog

Google Earth/Google Maps Mashups

Chris Gemignani

Yesterday, Google rolled out new mapping features for Google Earth and Google Maps. Many of these features are behind the scenes in the APIs, but there are great new capabilities that you will start to see. One thing I’m excited about is that KML—Google Earth’s format for building sophisticated map overlays—has come to Google Maps.

Google demoed this at their Geo Developer day yesterday using one of our Google Earth overlays that shows US census bureau data by county mapped as a heatmap. It looks like this.

Counties are displayed in a list on the left. When you click on a county, you get a nice popup showing statistics for that county.

There are a few limitations. Large KML files don’t load in Google Maps, medium-sized files load very slowly—it seems Google is parsing the KML using Javascript.

The mapping toolkits provided by Google Maps, Google Earth, and Yahoo Maps beta are well on their way to becoming important business tools once developers figure out how to wire in your enterprise data.

Without further ado, here are some US census data maps for you to explore in Google Maps.

Population Density

Lighter is higher population density (white is 800+ people per square mile), Dark is lower population density (black is 2 or fewer people per square mile)

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Median Age

Lighter is older median age (white is 46.0 years median age), Dark is younger median age (black is 29.0 years median age)

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Male/Female Ratio

Lighter means more men than women (white is 55% men), Dark means more women than men (black is 45% men)

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
Related posts
Topics:
, ,
  • http://www.coty.ws Coty Rosenblath

    This is very cool–particularly having Google demo with your overlays. I assume this will mean SketchUp models will be viewable in Maps, too. Do you know?

  • Chris

    Thanks, Coty. I’m not sure of the status on SketchUp. I’m guessing the models would be flattened, but it still may work to show floorplans and stuff like that.

    There’s a lot more testing that needs to be done.

  • Jason

    I love this concept and would like to start building similar overlays. I have zero programming experience, where do I start?

  • http://censuskml.blogspot.com/ Aidan

    Great Google Earth/Map post – thanks for sharing. Is there some trick to getting KMZs to work on Google Maps? I have generated a set that work great on Google Earth, but they generate an error on Google Maps. Since your team is using KMZs, is there any trick?

    Thanks!

  • Gautham Ramachandran

    I have a quick Q regarding data ownership. If I create a Zip Code Map with some specific point locations using Google Maps, who owns the data. Does Google house that data on their servers?

    Gautham.

  • Nikishna Polequaptewa

    This functionality is exactly what I need! How do you get all of the counties to show up at once in Google Maps in the folder tree fashion? When I import a KML file into Google Maps, it breaks it into 4-6 counties per page. I would like to view them all at once for California. Thanks!