As you can see have I have added a Google Map to my blog.

In less than 30 mins (15 of which was spent looking up the right CSS class for the brown border in the theme folder) I now have a nice little embedded map showing my location over my next trip. This was remarkable easy to create. As soon as I went to maps.google.com (whilst logged in to my gmail account) there was an immediately obvious link to 'my maps' which took me to a simple, responsive and intuitive interface for pushpins/lines/areas the lot.

However, despite this easy set up you'll see my map does have one disappointing aspect to it - zero coverage of North Korea - for whatever political reasons (although I can find no explicit mention why it is omitted) Google does not acknowledge the existence of any civilisation in the DPRK. However MS Live Maps does; now what prevents one and not the other (both US companies, in identical legal situations) from showing what is obviously available information (every paper atlas I have ever seen has Pyongyang marked) I can only guess.

So after a little more research I discovered that Live Maps have just added support for Google's KML, now along with the ability to return the KML from any Google My Map I can pipe these two together (check the second link) to have my pushpins shown on either map (Google for the world, and Live for when I am in DPRK).

Technical details from TechCrunch here.