Excellent Resource for creating Google Maps Mashups

Right after Hurrican Katrina struck New Orleans I had wanted to create a website which could be of help to the folks in New Orleans. There were quite a few websites doing exactly the same. I was looking for ideas as to what I could do different to help.

Right then I bumped into Mike Pegg's "GoogleMapsMania" website. This was my first exposure to Google Maps Mashups. I studied what kind of mashups people were developing and from Mike Pegg's website I got the idea of creating a website showing where businesses were opening up on Google Maps, after Hurrican Katrina had departed. (Now my New Orleans website is no longer active).

Mike has featured quite a few of my Google Maps Mashups from mibazaar.com on his site.

Another excellent resource for building Google Maps Mashups is John Musser's ProgrammableWeb. Some of the ideas I got from John's site are - building Google Maps Mashup with data from Microsoft's Expo.Live.Com and AOL's Video API. John has tons of API listed on his site which you could put to variety of uses with Google Maps.

John also has featured quite a few of my mashups and some of them went on to be "Mashup of the Day". (My developer profile at Programmableweb).

And then ofcourse there is Google Maps API website. This is a must read for building Google Maps Mashups.

Finally, there are quite a few books on Google Maps Mashups which would be an excellent reference and also which would generate more mashup ideas in the developer community. Some of these books are mentioned by Mike at GoogleMapsMania (which includes a book by yours truly).