Ryan Sholin

{Carnival! There’s a journalism blog carnival under way, hosted — if you can wrap your head around that concept — by the folks at Scribblesheet, some sort of collaborative writing tool I haven’t had a chance to look at yet. Here’s a review of their product at the Online Journalism Blog.}

I’ve written pretty extensively about the merits of using free online tools to embed, well, just about anything, in an online news story. Here are two map-based examples from opposite ends of the spectrum:

In the major metro disaster scene category, we have The Oregonian’s coverage of what looks like a pretty hardcore wind and rain storm this week, with all the photos, multimedia, and many stories aggregated on a Google map that a Web Producer* built the complicated way: updating a KML file and embedding the map created by it.

Here’s a snip of what the page looks like today:

The headlines on the left are being pulled off of RSS feeds from a couple different sections of the news site; the photos on the right are from a Flickr collection of photos by staff photographers. (Any contributed photos here? Why not a call for readers who use Flickr to tag their photos something common and pull that feed?)

It’s easy to navigate, with lots of content (including video that plays in an embedded Brightcove player in the pop-up from the spot on the map – always nice to see that), and once the files are put together, it’s not difficult for a producer to update the map.

At the other end of the continuum we have my local paper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, filling a hyperlocal need with a map of where to find houses and businesses decked out with lights for the holidays.

I love it. In fact, I live here, and I’m planning to use the map as a guide to take my family out to see the lights.

The folks in Santa Cruz (full disclosure: I worked at the Sentinel for a year) used ZeeMaps, a free map-building tool where you can add content to a map, embed it in your site, and most important for this exercise, allow your readers to add points on the map themselves.

Which means the map is an interactive, dynamic source of information for your community.

There are more than a few sites to help you get this job done. Check out FMAtlas or MapBuilder or even the ‘My Maps’ feature in Google Maps.

And if those tools are old news to you and you’re ready to go a little deeper down the rabbit hole, here’s the place to start learning about rolling your own embedded map.

Need more inspiration? Check out this list over more than 1,000 Google Maps mashups.

*The Oregonian Web Producer in question was Mark Friesen of NewsDesigner.com, who needs to update his blog.