May 4, 2008...7:37 pm
A Google Map treasure hunt
Long, long ago, back when ‘Google’ and ‘Yahoo’ were just silly words to most people, I made an internet treasure hunt called ‘Wuzzle the WWW puzzle.’ I wrote to businesses with websites and asked them to hide a secret link on their page, and in exchange for the extra hits this could bring them I asked them to donate prizes. I still have a few reproduction world maps that were posted to me from a map shop in Hawaii! My plan stalled when I tried to buy the domain name Wuzzle.com from a gay couple in California, and I lost interest in the idea…
I love Google Maps with its satellite pictures of the streets I know. When my partner goes away for work he sometimes sends me a link to the satellite map of his hotel, and I can see what he could see out of his window and feel like I know where he is.
Google are improving their satellite maps in some cities to show street level real time views, of course this has caused controversy and complaints abot invasion of privacy, but Google insist they’re showing only public streets and claims there’s no need for fuss.
Perhaps a Google Map internet treasure hunt could lead to shops, organisations or people with web sites and you could visit these to get another clue?
I like the idea of You Tube recorded clues too… Or perhaps even clues hidden on internet forums..? It would be good to scatter them through all the forms of the internet. It makes me think of those stories about people using online communities to create make-believe personalities. I remember hearing about someone who became well-loved on a cat lovers forum, they faked an illness to get sympathy and then went as far as to fake their own death to get reaction. I think there’s a kind of mystery in the ‘no one knows who you really are’ aspect of online lives this could be used in an online treasure hunt. Maybe you could be a kind of spy to find out who someone really is.
It’s not exactly to do with a treasure hunt, but I’ve thought of trying an email version of the ’six degrees of seperation’ experiment. This famous experiment involved sending a package from Omaha to Boston always by sending it to someone who might know the intended recipient of the package. It usually took six people to reach it’s target. I wonder how many times an email would have to be forwarded to get from the UK to Australia? Evidence suggests the world is ’smaller’ than it used to be, which should make it less than six, and especially if the target is on Facebook.
I suppose this online treasure hunt idea may be inspired by Geocaching, which uses the internet to list the Latitude and Longitude of hidden ‘treasures’ so that gps users can play a hide or seek adventure game. I haven’t tried this new sport, but I’d like to.
Perhaps an easy way to make an online treasure hunt would be using Google Earth’s abiliy to mark locations on it’s satellite imagery of the earth. Google Earth is a downloadable application that’s more or less an upgrade of it’s Google Map satellite images, but one of it’s key features is that user’s can create ‘content’ placing markers and text on it’s world globe, this might be anything from ‘Football Stadiums of the World’ to ‘My trip around Asia’.
I’ll have to have a think about adding, ‘My Treasure Hunt’.
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