Location Map: Crowd Source your Location Map with ZeeMaps

Sometimes you have the locations that you want to see on your location map, either as a list in spreadsheets or tables in some documents. ZeeMaps allows you to easily create maps from such lists.

Often, however, the list of locations is not known to you in a table or spreadsheet, but is known to other individuals who may be your customers, fans, critics, friends, users, and so forth. What you need in this case is an easy mechanism to geo-poll the people who have the location information and create your map.

ZeeMaps makes it very easy to crowd source data for your location map. It has features such as moderated additions, reserved marker groups, and add notifications to that allow you to start collecting location data and managing it all through your web browser.

We have several maps that are crowd-sourced with location data. Here are some samples:

Wet n Wild LE Spring Forward Collection Interactive Sightings Map. This map is for a specialized product that may or may not be available in your local stores. A prominent blogger has asked users to map out the locations where they have seen the product as being available. Typically companies have to spend thousands of dollars to create such store locator maps, and even then maps may not even be accurate or get out of date quickly. The beauty of such crowd-sourced maps is that they can be maintained over time with little overhead.
Tesla Model S Reservations Map: We are a big fan of Zip2, PayPal, Space X, Solar City, and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk. Whether you agree with electric cars as being the future or not, Tesla Motors is making waves in the Silicon Valley by building a high-powered electric car right here in the valley. Being such a fan of Tesla, we were delighted to see a crowd-sourced map of Tesla reservations created on a discussion group. While Tesla Motors the company may have such information, usually the information is not public and not available to the curious minded who’d like to know. We are impressed with the global reach of the reservations.Take a look!

APPLBL00M

August 23, 2014 at 4:34 am

I believe this is essentially the same thing that we’re doing with our meetup map. We allow members to add their approximate location so they can find each other. We utilize various features of ZeeMaps, such as requiring a key (so only forum members can place markers), requiring administrator approval before markers are added (so we can prevent duplicates, spamming, incorrect information, etc.), and custom field names. (such as “Forum Profile” and “Skype”) Our first version of the map used Google directly but it was plagued with spam. This service fits our needs perfectly.

zeemaps
September 18, 2014 at 6:14 pm

Hi, thanks for letting us know about your use case and your experience. Should help other users trying to set up similar maps. Your map looks nicely populated and colorful!

Brendon
June 16, 2015 at 9:05 am

Hi there! I am wondering where I would be able to see the version of the community map you have made. Wondering if it is available for public. Sounds like something I am interested in. Thanks!