Map of Architects on Twitter – Part 3

The map shown here is a .

View Architects, Designers and Consultants on Twitter in a larger map

UPDATE: the map above is now a master map; read the latest post for details.

All the users on the map have uploaded their own placemark. If you belong on the map please do add yourself according to the instructions below.

Those of you who have been around a while might know I’ve been trying to locate the architects twitter league on a map for some time. Here are my first and second attempts, neither of which work anymore – they were developed by third parties and I’m not able to resurrect them, though the second one was very impressive!

Fortunately Twitter has a great way of turning up new ideas and solutions to problems, and in this case the catalyst was Mark Schumann (@MarkSchuey on twitter) who is a director for Davis Langdon in Dubai.

Mark has been wandering round my blog dredging up useful things and brought to my attention the fact that the second mapping exercise was no longer working. He’d been looking for a way to put local construction twitter users, architects, consulants and designers on a map of the Middle East, so we started talking. As a result google maps came up as a solution.

Today you can make a google map (in My Places) such that anyone can edit it, which is what we have done here. We are then inviting all architects, designers and construction consultants who use twitter to put themselves on the map, share it and use it. This process is known as Crowdsourcing, where through our curation individuals can collaborate in small ways to generate something we can all share and use.

We hope you like the map. Please add yourself and tell others about it. Don’t forget to get local contacts you know to add themselves and make use of the map to find professionals local to you.

If you’d like to share the map feel free to use the shortened URL and the hashtag #architectmap as well to see what others are sharing about the map.

How to add yourself to the map

If you have a googlemail account you can save the map to ‘My Places’ so you can find it again. I recommend you do this first. The ‘Save to My Places’ link is at the top of the sidebar on the left hand side.

Whilst you are in the map, search for your location, or if you have a Google Places entry, your google places entry.

For a google places entry, click on the entry and ‘Save to map’ and choose the Architects, Designers and Consultants Map. Please only add your google places entry if you have an active twitter account, and make sure the account is in your entry so people can find and follow you.

For an individual, go to the map and click ‘Edit’ in the sidebar. Whilst you are editing please be careful not to move anyone elses placemarkers, and don’t edit the title and description. Click ‘done’ when you have finished editing, then you can explore the map without moving anything about.

Whilst in ‘Edit’, search for your location in the usual way. When you have reached the right place, right click and choose ‘Add a Placemark’.

Edit the placemark so that users can see who you are. We recommend using your twitter handle in the title e.g. @SuButcher.

Use the description for your twitter profile information, any links (you can use HTML here) including a link to your twitter account so people can click right through to follow you if they want. The simplest and most attractive will be if we all simply copy our profiles onto the map placemarks.

Don’t forget to click ‘Save’ and ‘Done’ when you are finished.

To add your twitter avatar as the place marker

In another browser window, go to your profile on http://twitter.com/ and right click on one of the avatars next to your tweets. Choose ‘copy link location’ to copy the url to your clipboard.

Back in the , edit your place marker once you’ve created it, to show your avatar, by going to your place marker on the map and clicking ‘Edit’ in the sidebar.

In the dialogue box click on the marker itself and choose ‘select icon’.

Paste in the url you have copied from twitter.com and click ‘OK’ and ‘Save’ and ‘Done’.

Now go explore the map!

Your comments and suggestions most welcome

If you have any comments, suggestions for how to improve the map, or issues with it, please post them here or on the map comments and we’ll do our best to make it as useful as it can be.