An
that I had (please forgive its been brought up before - didn't find it when Goggling) is to allow people to visualize their distance covered by projecting it on a line on a map, perhaps across the US.Such a map would contain "pushpin" marks for each person (showing where they are at that time, so map would always be changing as people updated their logs), that could serve to motivate ergers since they could see how far they have gone vs others. This could be used for an annual cumulative challenge or for shorter 100k or 250k type challenges. The route could just be a straight line between two cities or well known places.
Here is a demo of what it would look like:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&gl ... 84536&z=13
In addition, it could foster a bit of interest in geography in that when you are checking out where you are on the line of progress, on GoogleMaps or Google Earth, you can checkout all kinds of other stuff in the vicinity (points of interest, cities, flikr picture overlays, ...). Additionally, "seeing" how far you have gone on a map helps to make your distances more concrete (tell someone you rowed 10K and they usually don't have a good feel for how far that is, but tell them that you rowed from San Francisco to Oakland, well that's easier to visualize that kind of distance.)
In addition, it can foster the competitive spirit in people since they will see in more visual manner how they are doing relative to others.
A visual histogram showing the number of ergers in each of smaller legs of the path could easily be depicted in 3D in GoogleEarth, giving even more info on how you are doing relative to a pack. This is relatively easy with what I understand so far about KML.
I'm sure there are web programmers out there that could lend a hand in coming up with the sever side stuff to put this together, and I can lend a hand also. Do it open-source so that other types of activities could leverage it also and we could get back bug fixes?
It would all be implemented on web sever side of things, so clients logging in would just see a window showing the map and the overlay or a link to a KML file to display it in GoogleEarth. Server side would need to periodically scan the logged meters for members that have opted in this and build the necessary map file or KML file.
In addition, the "pushpins" on the map for each erger themselves can be clicked on to show some text, which could include a link to each member's public profile to show their picture and other public info so you can know more about who you are up against - maybe this could help build erging community ties?
Any thoughts? C2 - any interest?
This could be done on another site, but if it was on C2's, then it would have access to everyone's log data already and people are already going to that site to log their data and getting them to another site to relog or check where they are would reduce interest since people might not remember to go to that other site.
(There is some discussion on how to do this in the recently released book Google Apps Hacks/O'Reilly - Hack 121 - Create Google Map Overlays On The Fly)
If there isn't a response on this thread, I'll cross post this over to the more active threads and see if there is interest.
