Create Customized Maps Of Your Neighbourhood with SharemyMap

If you have always wanted to create a customized map where other people can leave comments or ask questions, Sharemymap is a great tool to get started. It’s a free web based map making tool which lets anyone create a customized map in no time. There are no signups or registration required, you can use your Facebook or Twitter account to get started.

To create a customized map of your city or neighborhood, just enter the initial location of your map and the website will show a brief preview of your city, as shown below:

Next, you can add a description and an avatar to your map. Adding a description and proper title will ensure that your map is found by the people who are searching for information or proper directions in your city.

The cool thing about Sharemymap is that you can add up to 5 custom fields, this can be anything from landmarks to popular places to places of interest and so on.

For example, if you are creating a customized map of your hometown, you can add custom fields such as market, railway station, bus stand, school etc. Then when you are adding a new marking point in the map – you can choose a custom field and enter the value of the respective custom field. This feature will be useful when you want to convey information to your map readers about specific attributes.

Once the map is created, you can add points to your map and then add an address, description, tag, Flickr photos and YouTube Videos. This is very handy, when the readers want to know about more information about the location in your map, you can add some fun element by choosing proper Flickr photos and YouTube videos at the respective points.

When you have finished creating the map, you can share your map on social sites e.g Twitter, Facebook. You also get a unique URL of the map just created, so that you can easily share it with anyone who need help, proper directions or want to know about a place in your city. (see example of a customized map)

The readers of your map can subscribe to the RSS feed of your map to know the future updates. They can leave comments and ask questions, all in all it’s a very useful service for tourists.

There are a few drawbacks found –  you are not given an embed code so this eliminates the idea of embedding the map in your blog or website. Readers can’t search for locations in your map by typing keywords, so if you are creating a large map of your city – you have to pinpoint every popular landmark yourself. There are no collaborative features as such, a group of people can’t work on the same map at the same time.

Some more tips on Map making:

1. Find Distance between two cities using Google Maps
2. Find older Images of a City using HistoryPin and Google Street View