[Mapit] Q - people mapping

[Nadim Shaikli]

I'm administering a couple of mail-lists in which from time-to-time people
get into a frenzy about wanting to know where each other are, which got
me to thinking.

Could I use Mapit (or a modification there-of or in association with
another application - sunclock/xearth, etc) in which I could show a map
of the world with subscribers' physical location highlighted somehow
(flag, red-dot, whatever).

Let me walk through an example of what I had in mind;

let's assume I have 5 subscribers to my list (let's make it simple :-)

 person-1 in Cairo,	Egypt
 person-2 in Berlin,	Germany
 person-3 in San Jose,	USA
 person-4 in Penang, 	Malaysia
 person-5 in Dallas,	USA

now when anyone asks where people are I'd simply put out the URL which
displays a flat earth view (all continents) with five red dots (one per
physical location of people listed above - done auto-magically somehow) --
when a user puts his/her mouse over the red dot the user's name, email,
phone, whatever else shows-up in a list-like format (in case there are
multiple subscribers in the same city).  As a simplification, instead of
mapping into cities, how about starting out with simply lumping people in
the same country together.  So in the case of person 3 & 5 above, one
single dot in the middle of the USA map would do for now.

I also think that this would be very popular with ANY and ALL
mailing-lists.  What I'm getting at is that I think you'd see lots of
people interested in downloading such a package and using it, be it
for mailing-lists or even for personal-use (phone-book, travel journal,
etc).

Is that possible ? how ? comments ?

Thanks

 - Nadim


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