GeoDjango Shines in St. Pete Times Neighborhood Watch

Neighborhood Watch sounds like just another real estate site, but it’s not. It’s only about Pinellas and Pasco counties single family home sales and it was developed by the News Technologist at the St. Petersburg Times for the paper. It automatically spits out reports about trend stories based on the data so real estate reporters can track bigger stories. The plan for the Google Maps/GeoDjango app is to add counties in the coming months, and there’s a plan to add condo information, too.

The fellow behind the app is Matt Waite, the St. Petersburg Times News Technologist. He’s also the person behind PolitiFact, the fact check site, built it using GeoDjango, PostGres, PostGIS and Google Maps. He abandoned MySQL due to its lack of spatial support. (Updating using a desktop GIS was too demanding.)

The app taps into an appraiser database and Waite explains how the paper had to draw some neighborhood boundaries in the suburbs.

This article about Neighborhood Watch is from MediaShift and is the first in the new series “The MediaShift Innovation Spotlight.” It “will look in-depth at one great mash-up, database, mapping project or multimedia story that combines technology and journalism in useful ways.” Readers of this blog may have some stories to submit for future coverage.