Decided to check out a few of Google's new mapping plugins and did a quick test of Geotrends. Must say that it is a neat twist to find where people are searching for search terms. This builds on Google's Trends, which is pretty useful, but isn't really geared to searching your geography. I did a search based on some CMS's that we will be testing for internationalization, basic usability & customization to see which of these terms Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress people are searching for. However when looking for what's hot in eastern Canada this Google Maps plugin is useful.

Now Google Trends can be limited by adjusting the URL to have geo=ca rather than geo=all, so that only Canadian results are visible for conservative party, liberal party, ndp, green party, bloc quebecois. But there is just something about a map. Certainly for presentations being able to pull up something like this can be quite useful. I'm looking forward to checking out other Google Map applications when I have time.