Killer Mashup Plots Your Schedule on a Google Map
Google Calendar allows you to place events on a map. Google Maps can plot just about anything, so you might think it would be easy to view your calendar on a Google Map. As it turns out, it is pretty easy, which makes it all the more surprising the Google hasn’t added this as a feature.
Blogger Tony Hirst mixed an RSS feed from Google Calendar with some KML generated using Yahoo Pipes as a middleman, to come up with today’s best mashup: your Google Calendar plotted on a map.
Head over to Hirst’s blog for the gritty details, but the process isn’t too difficult. You’ll just need to add the XML output for your calendar (it will need to be a public feed) to the Yahoo Pipe which will then extract the locations and generate a geoRSS feed. Enter that URL in the Google Maps search box and you’ll see all the events plotted out on the map.
At the moment the need to use public calendars may but some off this trick, but others, like, for instance, touring bands wanting to display a map of their tour on a website, need look no further.
One thing worth noting, Hirst admits that “the call to the Yahoo Pipe sometimes times out in the map.” To avoid timeouts he suggests saving the KML feed as a KML file, which you could then upload to your own server. Of course that ruins the auto-updating aspect, but for some uses, like the touring band example above, that won’t matter.
To see this in action, check out Hirst’s example feed.
[via Google Operating System]
