Project Update… The Home Strech!..maybe

Just a quick project update to where I am right now.

I mentioned earlier I was playing around with geocommons.com, as well as good earth as kind of a backup if my moving digital map did not pan out. I was able to create 10 stationary maps recording the birthplaces of NHL player every 10 years, to give a accurate portrayal of trends that occurred. I was hoping there was some sort of quick trick to import Excel info to google Earth, but this was not the case. Making these 10 maps consisted of me typing in individuall every single birth city, and creating a place mark for every player in the given years. As the dates got later, the amount of players added predictibly increased, with the most coming in 2008, with a total of more than 170 players who played their first NHL game in that year. However, as the dates also got later, the “Hey I know that guy!” occurred more and more, which added a bit more interest. I am continuing to play around with geocommons, and have found a tutorial on how to create a map that moves along a timeline, which was exactly my original idea. However, this feature does not seem to want to work with my data for whatever reason, but I am trying to work it out. I also am continuing to have the problem of the geocoding with geocommons. For the most part, the software plots the data in the right spot, however, there are some cases where it does not. For example, Al Montoya played his first game in 2008, and is from Chicago Illinois. On geocommons, there is a data plot in the middle of Alaska on the map, that gives the data for Al Montoya from Chicago. This continues to make zero sense to me, and I am not sure how to fix it.

Another interesting thing about geocommons is it allows me to convert my info on geocmmon into a KML file and put the data from geocommons onto Google Earth. I really wish I had known this before I manually created 10 maps on Google Earth. I had hope that when the data tranfered from geocommons to Google Earth, that the information would plot itself into the right location, but that is not that case.

Well until next time

GOod Luck Everybody! Were almost there