I used the “law of two feet” (also known as “quietly slipping out the back door when you’re bored”) and am now in a session showing a mashup between Google Maps and Google Calendar. I’m probably the only geek on the face of the earth who hasn’t tried out Google Calendar, and I’d better try it out if I’m going to do something like this for my own uses, such as scheduling my wine-tasting club’s events.
Patrick Chanezon of Google is giving the demo of this mashup that he created, and walking through any parts of the code that people are interested in. He just finished it this morning and it’s a bit rough, but pretty cool. You can paste in the URL of your Google calendar, select the number of months out to look, and generate a map of all the events in the calendar for which geocoding was successful. Although it’s not baked into this mashup, you could do all the other cool things in the Google Maps popups, such as creating tabs that have links to the event URL, microformatted date/time to add to personal calendars, and other information.
He’s editing one of the source files on his Mac right now using vi, which I find hilariously endearing. Reminds me of my TECO days, which are alarming easy to recall with that PDP-11 sitting next door in the Computer History Museum exhibits.
Patrick talks about the mashup on his blog here, and you can try out the mashup here. There’s no link to the session on the Mashup Camp page yet, I’ll update this entry with it later. He’ll also be publishing the code in a couple of weeks, likely linked from his blog or the Mashup Camp wiki page, so check back later if you’re interested.