This is a very creative use of Google Maps — all of the pages of a magazine tiled onto the surface of the map, to let you zoom and skim through the entire thing.
The site is Zkimmer. It’s certainly a unique concept, though I have to question the usefulness of it. I think there are a lot of interfaces for reading a magazine that are superior to this. However, I think that this site was probably going for more “unique” than “useful”, which I’d tend to agree with.
One thing that would help is if they enabled the scroll wheel on my mouse. In Google Maps (and many Google Map applications), I can use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. On this site, it doesn’t work. A concept like this involves a lot of zooming, so this would make it much easier for me to use.
Google Maps Mania has more information.
Just a note that most of the sites on zkimmer now use the zoom wheel in the Google API but also we have decided to go to the OpenLayers platform due to the tweaking we can accomplish there… we want to speed up double click/ zooming and the drag a box and fill the screen features… we are also experimenting with z laer text for google ranking of the pages… as you will note from the time this post was written we now have a zkimmer directory that includes photo albums, blue prints, artists portfolios and other online publications that only make sense in high resolution…
Thanks for letting me comment.
Ric Richardson
Founder – zkimmer