I’m addicted to mashups. It started back in 2004, when Housingmaps.com forever changed the way I searched for apartments on Craigslist. Slowly but surely, maps have invaded my psyche. They’re everywhere you look on the Web these days. Almost anything you’re searching for can now be found on a map. Looking for a taqueria in San Francisco? With 165 places to choose from, Burritoeater has totally got you covered.

Millions of mashups have been created in the last few years, and the number continues to grow exponentially as the technology becomes easier for non-programmers to use. Google Maps Mania does a good job reporting on the latest and greatest in the world of mashups, but it’s impossible to keep up with the crush of information coming through my RSS feeds every day. Occasionally, however, I do stumble across something that catches my eye. When I recently discovered the “Places mentioned in this book” mashup on Google Book Search, I knew I was in for trouble.

A mashup of every location mentioned in one of my Chronicle faves, Hatch Show Print. Click on the image to see the map in Google Book Search. Yee haw!

Instantly I knew this was going to become a huge time suck. Sure enough, I started plugging in some of my favorite titles to see what turned up and three hours later, I decided I’d better turn this into a blog post. No longer “wasted” time, this became “work.” Unfortunately, as I learned through many, many trial and error entries, a good number of our books aren’t mapped yet. I’d love to see a mashup of Where Flavor Was Born or check out satellite photos of the locations mentioned in My Favorite Place. Guess I’ll just have to keep checking back for updates…

A snippet from Craig Ferguson’s hilarious novel, Between the Bridge and the River, magically plotted to a location on the map.

The actual mechanisms powering this tool remain mysterious to me. When they announced the feature last year on Google’s blog, a software engineer wrote: “Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. When our automatic techniques determine that there are a good number of quality locations from a book to show you, you’ll find a map on the ‘About this book’ page.” Hmmm… I think I’ll call it “magic.” Ah, much better.

Switch to the satellite view and you can even zoom down to see the waves breaking at Maverick’s, the title break in Matt Warshaw’s awesome illustrated history of big wave surfing.

Guinevere Harrison
Copywriter

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