Google Maps are now embeddable as HTML in blog posts and other web pages. (If you’re familiar with embedded YouTube videos, it works exactly the same way.) This includes map layers (such as My Maps or a KML file). Which is to say that putting map data — any map data — on a web site just got considerably easier: as I understand it, if it can appear inside the Google Maps interface, it can appear on your web site. The Google LatLong blog post linked above has some examples; Ogle Earth has the text of an e-mail from Google that offers more detail.

I should have figured something like this was up earlier this month, when Apple announced that Google Maps could be added, widget-style, in web pages generated by iWeb.

This is big news: as My Maps made it easier for mere mortals to generate mappable content, this makes it easier to publish that content. I’ve had a half-finished mashup on my personal site for a while: this is going to make it dead easy to finish without a surfeit of JavaScript.

Stefan (see above) also nails it: this is very big news for bloggers. Watch for embedded maps to be as common as embedded video in blog posts before very long.