Google’s Intensity Map charts are a really easy and clean way to show heat maps of geographic data. Unfortunately, there’s no way to take the next step in the user experience, and let people mouse over and click on the maps to see additional information about a particular area.

To solve that problem, I’ve written a PHP script that extracts the country and state boundaries from the maps and constructs a Javascript function to return the state code for any point on the maps. You can see an example of this in practice at http://web.mailana.com/labs/mapclicker/ or you can download the complete source, including the boundary extractor.

The example page will show the state or country code for any point you move the mouse over on either of the maps, and if you click, will display an alert showing the name. It assumes your image has the maximum 440×220 dimensions, but you can apply scaling to the coordinates if you are using something smaller.