I am always surprised when I know something about the Web someone else doesn't. I usually feel like the slow coach crawling up the tail end of the learning curve, head-on into a bad metaphor.
But yesterday I was talking to a friend who is part of an organization which brings people from all over the county to Bellingham for meetings on a regular basis. A number of the travelers are interested in carpooling but the logistics haven't been solved.
"If only there was an easy way to put all the member's addresses on a map," said my friend.
"Hold it," I said. "You need a mashup."
"What's that?'
"It's when you combine data from two different computer applications. Pulling addresses from, say, an Excel database and slapping them into a Google map has to be one of the classics. I don't know how to do it, but somebody does."
I admit I felt a bit like the Pointy-Haired Boss in Dilbert who once said, approximately "I begin by assuming that anything I don't know understand is easy to do."
But this morning I did a little digging on the web and promptly came up with Batchgeocode which holds your hand right through the process. You can create a map as quickly as you can type in the addresses or paste them from Excel. I'm sure there are other services that can do it as well, but I'm happy with one.
4 comments:
Thanks for the link. I wanted to learn how to do that, too.
P.S. The mashed potatoes really were a bad metaphor.
;-)
I thought the train was a bad metaphor. The potatos are cool.
Well, I'm certainly impressed by your being able to guide people to insightful and helpful technical information... Wait! Isn't that what you do for a living? I think you might be hard-wired to inform. :D
Ah, you give me the chance to use one of my favorite quotations:
"information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter."
-Mark Twain
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