Map the Sewintists: New and (slightly) Improved!

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It's been exciting and frankly shocking to see so many people participate over the last 8 months in my mapping project!  When I came up the with idea that morning last February over breakfast, I thought I'd get maybe 100 people participating, which was about how many readers I had at that point.  Little did I expect that it would grow to 800+ people and places of interest!  When I talked to people outside the creative community about this, the first thing they always ask is, "How are you making money from it?"  

They've kind of missed the point, haven't they?  

I didn't spend loads of time and money developing a website; I simply opened up a portal that helped people come together, either for fun or for collaborations.  It was free for me to set up like this, and it has taken way less time that blogging for me to manage.  (In fact, I should really go back there today and clean up some of those double pins and errant pins in the middle of the oceans.  Unless you pinned while sailing the 7 seas?  No?  OK, they'll be deleted soon.)  



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But seriously, the utility of the map was limited by the page breaks that were automatically made after ~120 pins.  I tried to find someone who could translate the idea to a dedicated web page, but it was going to be too complicated and way too expensive for me to undertake.  So, in lieu of the time and money (and coding knowledge needed) to create a dedicated page for Map the Sewintists, I've found two ways to view all the pages as one.  I've changed the text on the original Google Maps page to this:

"Map the Sewintists
.................................. 

Because we have ~500 participants, we have spilled over on to 5 pages. Scroll down to the bottom of the list of people to see the page numbers, and they you can look at each page individually.

If you'd like to view all the pins together in one map, you have two options:

1) Easy: visit the compiled map here: http://goo.gl/maps/Y5BZd

2) If you have Google Earth: Click on the blue KML button below. A file will open in Google Earth."



I hope that makes the experience for everyone a bit easier.  Again, please let me know either though this blog or by private email about any connections you've made via the map.  I'll do a blog post if I get some interesting stories!  I know that I've used it twice already; once to find people near Tampa when I was travelling for work, and now I'm using it for my job (which I can't really talk about yet, but I'll explain if it pans out).





Thanks everybody, and happy pinning!