|
|
|
Former Macquarie Radio Network (Australia) CEO Angela Clark has launched Streetcorner and a map-based site, Everymap.com.au, built on the open source Ushahidi, well-known for its use during unrest and emergencies. The mapping information will be crowdsourced.
Here’s the map (and yes, you can download the data) and some other infographics.
And, equally valuable, “how they did it,” that is collected, cleaned and analyzed the data.
- The Chicago Tribune
The post by Lauren Kirchner highlights how it’s being used by journalists.
- CJR
Andrew Long proposes:
Arizona just saw a monumental political shift. Republicans and other right leaning candidates scored major victories in local and national races. I would like to analyse and visualize the geography of that shift. I propose to take the precinct data from this election and compare it to 2008. I’m interested in discovering the geography of the shift.
Spot.us is one of those new journalism sites where those interested in the story can fund the effort. BTW, Long is currently working on a Geography degree at the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning at Arizona State University and has started his own company to do mapping.
- Spot.us
Interesting article by Eric Rodenbeck, the founder and creative director of Stamen, on the plans for soon to be released open source Citytracking.
Citytracking, one of this year’s Knight News Challenge winners, will present digital data about cities that journalists and the public can easily grasp and use, and provide tools to let them distribute their own conclusions. We will build a series of tools to map and visualize data that is truly Internet-native and useful. The project will be:
- Simple enough that a fairly technical reporter who understands Google Maps and basic HTML can embed something good in their article/report/blog posts.
- Beautiful enough that an interested amateur citizen will find it useful and interesting.
- Complex enough to catch the attention of developers nationwide, who we hope will contribute to the project on an ongoing basis.
This caught my eye:
There have been several attempts to turn a thriving open source ecosystem into a money-making operation (Cloudmade off the back of OpenStreetMap, EveryBlock’s acquisition by MSNBC). Generally these tend to be unsuccessful or boring. The model that Drupal uses, where an open source platform is supported by both an open source community and a thriving commercial practice around supporting it, seems like a model worth thinking about.
