Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

one step further

Developers online are doing some amazing work these days involving Google Maps and Flickr.

Last week, Adrian Holovaty unveiled ChicagoCrime.org, which integrates Google Maps with the last three months’ worth of Chicago crime data. You can drill down the data by date, time, neighborhood/beat, type of crime and more. The site even offers RSS feeds of the latest crime data for a given city block or police beat. Fantastic work. I don’t even live in Chicago, but I find the site — and how its lessons can be applied to other locations and data types — fascinating.

A month or two earlier, Paul Rademacher put together HousingMaps, which integrates Google Maps and craigslist. Users can look up (and see plotted on the map) craigslist apartment, sublet and home sale listings, filtered by price range, if desired. It would be cool if users could enter their own search terms — i.e. “clarendon” — and see those results plotted on the map. I’m not sure how this application pulls its data, but I know that craigslist does automatically generate RSS feeds based on search results.

One of my newest obsessions recently has been GeoBloggers.com, which plots geocoded Flickr images onto Google Maps. Steeev put together an awesome Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox (which also integrated Google Maps) that allowed users to search for a photo’s coordinates from within Flickr. Sadly, he ran afoul of the Flickr powers that be earlier this week, and he’s stopped working on the plugin for now. That also means that my own Flickr geocoding has stalled until an easier method of finding lat/lon coordinates comes around. (That Greasemonkey plugin was so simple, it spoiled me.)

Other Flickr niftiness:

• Mappr, a Flash-based site that also plots photos with location-related tags (although not totally accurately) with fairly clean interface.
• Airtight’s Flickr Related Tag Browser, which, as the name implies, allows the user to search for Flickr photos by tag/keyword, and see related photos/tags. The design is very Flash-y; it definitely has the “cool” factor. Very clean and nicely done.