Last night I was invited by Aileen Apolo to attend the Google Mapping Party in Bubba Gump Greenbelt. I finally met some of the top Pinoy Mappers and the event was also attended by fellow bloggers like Juned, Winston, Markku, Berniemack and Jay. Ive been seeing google maps in some local travel blogs like Marikinalife.com and Lakwatsero, since then, Ive been wanting to embed maps of some destinations that Ive been to but I guess I just don’t know how to do it (hehe) till Jay de Jesus and Winston Almendras taught me how to do it and its actually easy.

I’m glad more and more Pinoy Google Map Makers are getting more active in updating some local destination Google Maps since it will definitely help local and foreign travelers easily find a specific location like tourist spot, hotels, restaurants and other tourism related establishments.

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You will be surprised that some popular Philippine tourist destinations are now updated in Google Maps like Baguio City and Angeles City in the north; Bacolod City and Iloilo City in the Visayas; and Cagayan de Oro City and KoronadalCity in Mindanao. Aside from adding street-level details, users have utilized other useful features of Google Map Maker for plotting landmarks and tourist attractions around the country, including the Merville Access Road.

I would like to commend Pinoy Google Map Maker for editing and creating street maps which can be easily accesed using Google’s dynamic and collaborative geographic search platform.

“We are truly amazed at the enthusiastic and passionate response for Google Map Maker in the Philippines which is the number two country in the world for this product. There are now thousands of local users that have contributed hundreds of thousands of edits to Google Map Maker in the past six months,” said Derek Callow, Head of Marketing, Google Southeast Asia. “On behalf of the millions of people all over the world who can now see and use the improved Google Maps of the Philippines, we’d like to thank all those exceptional Filipino contributors who proudly, selflessly and tirelessly continue to enhance the virtual face of their beautiful country.”

Callow added, “We have seen an increase in Map Maker edits for the areas outside of the main cities which indicates the interest among Filipinos across the country to map out their local communities and contribute to this national effort. The next step is to encourage fun community-level activities to accelerate the mapping momentum, so we created a Mapping Party Kit to help Filipinos map their entire country and all 7107 islands, one party at a time.”

Google Map Maker was launched in the Philippines in October 2008 to provide map enthusiasts a fun, easy-to-use web-based tool to personally contribute to the building and updating of online map data for the country. The first batch of local Map Maker edits was pushed to Google Maps in March 2009, covering a substantial part of Metro Manila and provinces such as Rizal, Cebu, Davao, Guimaras and Iloilo.

To see samples of local Google Maps, checkout the links below

Angeles – view timestamp video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8-ILLl0m4g
Cagayan de Oro – view timestamp video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_UIF7GK2UU

I’m planning to contribute soon and maybe create a Google Map of some towns in Quezon Province specially my hometown : Tayabas.

PS : Checkout Annalyn’s – a fellow Pinoy Travel Blogger’s Carnival of Cities