Today Google tweeted about a guy who decided to map Kazakhstan. Yes, the entire country. For those of you who don’t want to go read the news article, the summary is that Kyril Negoda discovered that his home country wasn’t mapped on Google, so he took it upon himself to use Google’s Map Maker tool to map it himself.

This article, combined with sightings of the Google Street View car in Bethlehem today inspired me to check out Map Maker for myself. It’s pretty easy to get the hang of and after a bit of playing around with it I managed to add the building at Penn State Lehigh Valley and Nittany Lion to the map. It’s a community reviewed project, so everything you do has to be approved by other users before it shows up on live Google Maps.

As someone who has been into mapping things for a few years now, this is pretty cool, since it’s helping improve maps for everyone, not just myself. I’m not sure how items for review get queued up, but I’m hoping someone will finally push through the change that it’s no longer Lehigh Valley College and that it’s Penn State Lehigh Valley at that location, considering that Penn State has been operating at that site since 2009.

If you’ve ever used Google Maps and noticed that something you looked up was inaccurate or if you ever wanted to add some more detail to a map, I encourage you to check Map Maker out. It’s fun, easy to use and helps make maps more accurate for everyone.