My Google Map Blog

Three years ago while camping in the Adirondacks, Michael Comeau dropped his camera into a small stream and was unable to find it. This past July, John Noerr stumbled across the camera and was able to track down the owner of it thanks to some creative thinking, hard work, and Google Earth. You can read the full story here.

John used Street View to try to identify the location of some of the photos on the card, then he used Google Earth to pin locations of various photos.

In the end, it came down to a handful of pictures: the front stoop of a house numbered 327, one of the sky, and a shot of a corner of a building with "very unique stone work" and a visible sign for 3rd Street.

"I went onto Google Earth Street View and started looking up every 3rd Street I could find," he said.

That placed him in the camera owner's neighborhood, where other identifiable buildings and doors popped up that Noerr recognized from pictures on the memory card. Faster than he imagined, he found the house, No. 327, on Street View, tracked down the building's owner, and used Facebook and Twitter to contact the family.

(via ABC News)

I've been a big fan of Meograph since it was released earlier this year, as it's a great tool to help show news stories using a heavy dose of geo reference. The big downside to it was that creating a "meograph" of your own was a fairly complicated thing to do. With their latest update, the authoring tool has become much easier to use, as you can see from the demo below:

They've also just added a new feature that showcases a fresh meograph each morning with highlights from the 2012 Presidential Election coverage. You can find this daily feature at www.meograph.com/election2012.

Here is an embedded version of yesterday's update, which makes great use of photos, videos, audio, all with geo reference behind the content.

Meograph is shaping up to be a very powerful tool, especially with these new authoring tools and the continued refinements to the service. It'll be interesting to see if adoption of the tool continues to grow in future months. Try it for yourself at meograph.com.