A new mapping tool

UPDATE: The “College New Media Map” is now a permanent fixture of the blog. You can find it here.

UPDATE 2: Rick Burnes of Faneuil Media responded to a question I posted in the FMAtlas Google group: “It would be great to see college news sites start using Atlas, and we’d love to hear how we can make Atlas more useful to them. We have no plans to charge for Atlas. At some point we may include advertising in the iframe we supply, but this would primarily be for maps that get a lot of traffic. It would also be completely unobtrusive. The goal here is to help publishers create cool new content; we will not do anything that upsets the quality of content.”

Via the Institute for Analytic Journalism, I find this new tool from Faneuil Media: Atlas.

Atlas allows publishers – national chains, hyperlocal news sites and bloggers – to add interactive maps to their stories in seconds.

Right now Atlas is in alpha – that means you’re using a very early version of the product. We’re still doing lots of testing and iterating, and we’d love any feedback you want to give us.

Faneuil Media helped create the Barista Teardown Map we wrote about previously.

Just to show what Atlas can do, I created this map of several college news publications with innovative content online. I hope to add to the map in the coming days. I created the map in Atlas and then embedded it in the site here with some code that was provided by the Atlas application. Click on the “points” to see information about these campus media outlets.

You can adjust the size of the map, the size of the zoom buttons, and the types of “points” you want to use. Also, if you embed the map into your web page, you can make later changes to the map, and they will show up when the web page is refreshed.

You can also import CSV (comma separated values) documents into Atlas to add points onto a map. For instance, say you had a list of campus organizations and their addresses. You could easily import the .csv file into Atlas and populate the map that way.

Obviously, there are a number of ways this could be used in college media. And it makes the process easy. Right now, accounts are free, and the service is in “alpha,” which means that you may experience some glitches as you use it. But it is definitely an easy tool to use.

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