Your GMap

Every now and then, I find something that grabs my attention and says "this has real applications right now!" YourGMap is one of those things. I found this one a long time ago and was recently asked if I knew of an application that did just what this one does. I had posted it to my first blog, but wanted to capture the content and have it on this blog.

YourGMap is a FREE web based application that lets you create your own map and publish it to the web so you can link to it from any web page or email message. I quickly put together a map of the west district county offices and research stations.

Because this is based on Google's Map program, you can pinpoint down to within a 100 yards or so or you can map points across the country or world. You can indicate a location by street address, GPS coordinates or by pointing to it on the map. You can also add comments to each location. I choose to include the address and entered the phone and fax numbers. Once you've created a map, you can go back and edit it later to remove or adjust your locations or add more locations to it.

How could an Extension Agent use this?

• Map your demonstration farms. Use different color pointers to indicate different types of demonstrations.
  
• Map disease or insect outbreaks.
  
• Map the largest trees in the county.
  
• Map the roadside vegetable stands.
• Map the 4-H Clubs meeting places.
  
• Map the locations where you will be teaching a nutrition class. Use the comments to indicate the date and time for that location.

These are just a few ideas that I thought of off the top of my head. I'm sure you can think of many more that apply to your work.