A few days after the Iowa caucuses (Jan. 3), I was browsing MediaGazer (sort of a TechMeme-like site, except for articles about media, not technology), and I ran across this curious article:

How Google beat AP with Iowa caucus results (and why it matters).

The article details how the free data and tools offered by Google allowed some coder at a local news site to easily update polling data and present them in a map format. Interesting in itself, but what struck me was that the station used Google Fusion Tables, that I had never heard of.

Basically, a Fusion table is new document type in Google Docs – and is still in beta.

It allows you to upload – from desktop, Google Docs or whatever – a CSV file and, if you geocode the entries, it’ll allow you to create a map, generate a link that’s an iFrame (pointing to Google) that displays the map.

This is potentially very powerful. One could, for example take a weekend trip to somewhere and then build out a map showing all the places you’ve been in a very easy fashion.

I decided to try this out – I live in the Chicago area, so I generated a CSV file of random pictures from the Chicago area from my gallery database and created a Fusion Table.

The hard part was geocoding the dozen or so pics (I can’t wait for cameras that will do this by default moving forward). But once that was done, I created the map and it’s embedded here.

The Google tutorial was a little muddled, but if you know what you’re doing it’s pretty intuitive. I’m still looking for an API guide for this; nothing so far, but I haven’t tried that hard.

And interesting tool – I just wonder if Google will maintain support for this. The company is famous for putting stuff out there and then, sometimes years later (after some have been sold on the tool), dropping support. And example is the SOAP search (so one could fetch data from Google via SOAP and display results on one’s own site. I remember playing with it (using Perl), and it was a good exercise. I never used it for anything except to play with it, but what if I had and it just “went away”?

Anyway, Fusion Tables are an interesting approach to mapping, and I’m sorta surprised that I ran across it not on a tech blog but on a web story about media.

Go figure!