Yes, I too saw John King of CNN doing the "stretch and shrink" act on the touch screen last night and Paul Well's comments notwithstanding, I have a different take. What's going simply illustrates the problem that many users of web services, like Google Earth, are and will face when it comes down to wanting more than what it was designed to do.

First, King does a fantastic job and to the extent that CNN has the right statistics at his fingertips is quite good...for what it was intended to do. What is was NOT intended to do was get down into finer demographic detail and display additional political boundaries nor could it query the political districts for certain data that King so desperately wanted at his fingertips.

The CNN political geography map web service that they constructed becomes inadequate when situations like the one that occured last night for Lake County Indiana. Lake County had votes outstanding and was late in reporting results. Everyone is focused on this single county to give them the Clinton/Obama vote given the closeness of the primary election. And here's Mr. King manually drawing in the congressional districts with his finger to try to assess where he "expected" each candidate to have a better chance of pulling votes. It didn't work. The level of voting detail was not there for him to truly predict the results. What he was trying to do was to mark the congressional district boundaries and then overlay the satellite image to those boundaries to look as rural versus urban areas. Obama was pulling better statewide from the urban areas; Clinton from the rural, white communities.

It served as an example of what happens to the expectations of users who believe that a static, web service will do just fine until there is a need to drill into the details. We saw this happen to products like MapPoint 2000 when just simple thematic mapping quickly becomes inadequate when you try to do more advanced analysis and ask questions that it was never designed to accept. The same is true for the CNN Touch Screen. It doesn't have all the boundary data like congressional district maps or precinct maps (which I am sure will be needed eventually). And while the satellite maps are nice it, seemed like Mr. King was a little ill-prepared to describe the geography other than being able to point to rural vs. urban areas and found himself not knowing some of the geography (like the I90 toll road for which he was grasping). He really needed another overlay of the road network and additional POI data.

So, I continue to revel in the CNN coverage just because the maps are now a highlight of the evening..and yet there is so much more that could be done. Linking to live vote counts by precinct? You know it's coming.