The Google Map Creator is a freeware application designed to make thematic mapping using Google Maps simpler. The application takes a shapefile containing geographic areas linked with attributes and automatically generates a working Google Maps website from the data. It does this by pre-creating all the necessary files and saving them into a directory. Publishing the map on the web is then just a matter of copying files onto a web server, allowing Google Maps to be used with the majority of ISPs.

Allows users to store, tag, and share locations -- based on google maps, but does interesting things. Users add photos of places, and lots of other tagged info about the places.

The map images as well as the satellite imagery belong to Google and are pulled from maps.google.com. The data is extracted from the 2000 United States Census and can be downloaded from www.census.gov.

neat application of google maps