During my blog reading yesterday, a couple of sites were linked to and definitely were noteworthy.
The first is Yahoo TagMaps. It's a project from the Research group and it integrates Flickr photos tagged with location information with Yahoo! Maps so you can move thru locations and photos in a different way. Additional information can be found at SearchEngineLand and the O'Reilly Radar.
The second I found via BoingBoing and it's a Homeless Heat Map for downtown Los Angeles. Taking the available data for the homeless, the information was put onto a map and utilized heat maps to show where folks were congregating. The Map shows the progression for every two weeks. It is interesting to see how everyone moved. blogdowntown gives a glimpse about how the maps were put together as well as some additional information.
What I find cool about these two sites is the use of maps for the user interface. With the explosion of mashups for the various mapping sites, I believe it is beneficial to look at how those maps can be used for other types of data. Using a map gives an added amount of perspective that just text and links doesn't. To see the migration of the homeless over a two week period on a map is a much more effective way of communication then just sending out an email with an Excel spreadsheet attached.
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mashup, maps, mapping, maps+as+interface