Ohio Is A Piano

There are 88 keys on a normal piano.  Anyone that enjoys playing or forced into piano lessons can tell you as much.  Well someone recently realized there are also 88 counties in Ohio. So what's a geek to do with this discovery?  Why he created a program that created a piano out of Ohio's counties! Now he didn't just assign a key per county, no, that would be too easy.  He assigned keys based on different information that you can choose from, name, population, density, no. of farms, etc. The result?  Well, it often sounds like an out of tune piano when playing music, but interesting none the less.  Play around with the "Assign note according to:" and see what you can come up with.
ohioPianoApp 300x225 Ohio Is A Piano

Ohio Is A Piano

There are many directions one could go from here. I have chosen a few ways to see the geography of music (songs) and hear the music of geography (data, metro areas, or sequences based on Google Maps routing). In my experience, most of it sounds like crap, apart from the provided simplified bits of actual songs of course, although even those might sound wrong (but hey, blame the sheet music I found). But I would be very interested to hear if anyone discovers any patterns that sound decent. What’s missing, of course, is the ability to compose your own geographic music, that is, bringing in your own songs, sequencing counties into songs, seeing the data and grouping it in different ways, making your own chords and routes, and so on. That and controlling the music from the piano as well as the map. Compositionally, for now you’re stuck with just moving the mouse over the map, but perhaps you can imagine how this concept could be turned into a full-fledged crazy musical cartography application.
Ohio is a Piano

Popularity: 1% [?]

Global Game of Monopoly With Google Maps

500x articlemon 300x135 Global Game of Monopoly With Google MapsWelcome to Monopoly City Streets. You versus the world in the biggest live game of MONOPOLY in history! On the 9th SEPTEMBER, a world of property empire building on an unimaginable scale will be launched! A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence. Own any street in the world. Build humble houses, crazy castles and stupendous skyscrapers to collect rent. Use MONOPOLY Chance Cards to sabotage your mates by building Hazards on their streets. Which strategy will you employ? Determined drive? Ingenious daring? Intelligent caution? Will you thrive under the pressure of a fast growing global property empire – or will you crumble? Find out if you’ll thrive, or even survive, in the amazing world of MONOPOLY City Streets. It's going to be epic fun!
Yes, I want in.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Cost to Drive

If you've wondered how much it's actually cost you to drive somewhere with the current gas prices, Cost2Drive will help you figure it out.  You input your starting location and destination, and using Google Maps it determines the distance driven.  It then calculates using the average price of gas in the area (subject to fluctuation). Cost2Drive

Popularity: unranked [?]

Google Maps Now Has Weather

Enjoy Google Maps? Well it just became more useful. Go over to Google Maps, click the My Maps Tab, and select The Weather Channel. You can now have the radar or cloud cover overlayed onto the map. There are also little bubbles in certain locations showing current conditions and temperatures that you can click on for more details. Just another way Google Maps is useful and fun.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Check CellPhone Signals in Your Area

SignalMap uses Google Maps to allow people to report there cell phone signal strength in different locations.  Using this site you could post your cell phone carrier and signal strength, compare with other people and other carriers, and determine who you should or should not consider for your cell phone service. Signal Map

Popularity: 1% [?]