3 Cool Google Maps Mashups

As you may know, I am a huge fan of maps - especially GoogleMaps - and I recently found these mashups that make pretty cool uses of it. There are a ton out there, these are just a few I found to be particularly neat.

• GMaps Pedometer - Uses GoogleMaps to allow you to create a path with waypoints, much like GPS does, and it will give you the distance, elevation profile, and if you want, calories burned (depending on your weight). Could be useful to see or plan your common or upcoming walking routes, or to measure distances to places. In addition to the standard "Map," "Satellite," and "Hybrid" views, you can have a USGS topo overlay too, which can be pretty neat when measuring trails or other features you can't see with the other options.

• Shaded-Relief.com - Basically GoogleMaps with additional overlay options of shaded relief of the world, as well as "VE" (not sure what it stands for) that taps into the Geonames database of all sorts of location names - mountains, rivers, lakes, roads, schools, monuments, stores, etc. - this option has a higher density of features than the standard GMaps, and allows a higher zoom level. This site also lets you search the Geonames database for something, and then it plots the results on the map with a list of them at the right for you to select from. Pretty much just a tweaked GMaps, but neat.

Wedding-Mapper.com - Man, I wish I had found out about this one this summer, when I was doing the same things manually and much less snazzily! This mashup lets you enter in all the relevant locations for your wedding and categorize them as hotel, restaurant, ceremony, reception, entertainment, airport, etc. It then plots them on a GMap, and you can edit the text bubbles for each place, and add pictures, etc. There's a sample map here. If you know anyone getting married soon, forward them this link!