Mapping the Panic on the Streets of London

In the UK a government minister responded to a threat of strike action by the country's fuel haulage truck drivers by telling the population to stock up on gasoline. The result has led to huge queues at gas stations and led to many gas stations running out of gas.

So even without an actual strike the UK government appear to have spurred panic buying and the start of a fuel shortage. As ever The Guardian has been quick to map the rising panic. It has asked its readers if they have seen cars queuing at gas stations or if they have been stocking up on gas themselves.

Here is a Google Map of the responses so far.

CNN iReports on Google Maps

CNN iReport is a portal for individuals to tell their own news stories. iReport includes many tools to help contributors tell their stories and discuss the issues that interest them.

The CNN iReport Map is a Google Map showing the location of user contributed stories. As well as browsing the stories by location via the map the submitted stories can be searched by 'most viewed', 'most commented' and 'most shared'.

If you click on a story's marker on the map you can read a brief introduction and, if the story interests you, click through to read the complete submitted story.

An Edmonton Property Tax Assessment Map

The Edmonton Property Tax Assessment Map is a great example of using Google Fusions Tables with Google Maps.

The Edmonton Journal created the map to visualise Edmonton's 2012 property assessments. The map allows readers to compare the average assessment of single-family homes by neighbourhood in 2012 and 2011; as well as the percent change from 2010 to 2011, 2011 to 2012 and during the five years from 2007 to 2012.

The map include selectable layers, a dynamic legend (that updates automatically when different layers are selected) and even includes the Edmonton Journal masthead.

If you want to know how to create a dynamic legend with Fusion Tables and Google Maps then you should dive into the code in this Fusion Tables API Example Map.

The Google Map of the World's News

Hubii has to be the slickest and easiest to use news map that I have seen yet.

With Hubii users can zoom in on any location on Google Maps and find local newspapers. As users pan and zoom the map news stories from that location are automatically loaded into the map sidebar.

If a user clicks on one of the news map markers, that are placed on major cities around the world, they can view the newspapers available at that location. Users can then select to view the particular newspapers that they are interested in or even select which sections in a newspaper that they wish to view.

Registered users can create their own personalised 'Mapazine'. As they browse the map they can add individual newspapers to their own personalised news reader so that each time they log-in to Hubii they can instantly view their own personalised news stories.

The World's News on Google Maps

Newsonmap.in is a new Google Maps based application for finding the latest news for any location in the world.

By default the map loads the news based on the user's home country. You can zoom in on an area on the map to get more localised news. To load news for a particular location you can also click on the map or use the search function.

The news for the selected location is automatically loaded into the map sidebar. If you click on the sidebar news headline the full news story will open in a new browser window.

Polling Results with Google Maps

Danish TV and Radio company DR Forside are using Google Maps to present the results of a poll into gay weddings in churches.

The media company carried out a poll, asking priests if they were in favour or against gay couples being allowed to marry in church. The results of the poll have been overlaid on a Google Map so that readers can see where priests voted yes or no to the question.

The map is a great visualisation of the poll's results but it does need a key. I can work out that a green overlay on the map corresponds to a 'yes' answer and red is 'no' but what does yellow mean? Does it stand for undecided?.

The map reflects the answers to three questions:

1. Homosexual couples should have same marriage rights as hetro couples?
2. If asked, will you give your church blessing to a homosexual couple that have entered into a domestic partnership?
3. Do you think that the Danish church needs a wedding ritual for homosexual couples?

The results were then calculated based on an average of each priest and of all the priests in the 98 municipalities in Denmark.

RED indicates that the priests answered 'no'.
GREEN means they answered 'yes.
YELLOW means they have answered both 'yes' and 'no'.

Press Freedom on Google Maps

Great Name, the creators of the ever popular Newspaper Map have released a new map called Freedom of the Press 2011.

Newspaper Map uses Google Maps to help you find and translate newspapers around the world. The new Freedom of the Press map shows you the relative press freedom in each of those countries.

Each country is ranked on the map using data from Freedom House.

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Side-by-Side Street View Comparisons

I missed this impressive use of custom Street Views by the New York Times when it was published back in May. However it is so good that it is worth posting even this long after the event.

Panoramas of Joplin Before and After the Tornado uses Google Map Street Views of Joplin side by side with panoramas taken after the Joplin tornado hit.

A number of newspapers have created clever visualisations of the damage caused by natural disasters by using before and after satellite imagery. For example both ABC News and The NYT published comparisons of satellite imagery of Japan before and after this year's earthquake.



The New York Times however are the first newspaper to create a before and after visualisation using Street View. The paper took a number of 360 degree photos of areas of Joplin after the May tornado. They then used the Custom Street View functionality in the Google Maps API to create Street Views from their panoramas.

The custom panoramas have been placed side-by-side with the Google Maps Street Views from the same location. As you pan the Street View the custom panorama moves to show exactly the same view, to show the devastation caused by the earthquake.

Via: Google Maps for Journalists

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Browse the New York Times by Location

You can now browse the New York Times by location using the Longitude Google Map.



Geotagged news stories are displayed on the map with a Times 'T' logo. If you click on a map marker an information window opens with ten recent articles from the paper for that location.



Beneath the map you can view a list of locations from today's edition of the paper. Clicking on these links will also open the relevant information window on the map.



Via: Read Write Web



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Unrest in the Arab World on Google Maps

CNN has created a time-line and Google Map of the unrest sparked by the Arab Spring.



CNN's Unrest in the Arab World allows you to click on individual countries and read an overview of events since the unrest began earlier this year. The time-line presents a chronology of the events from the anti-government protests that started in December in Tunisia up until current events.





Mibazaar's Middle East Protest Tweets Map is a little more immediate. This map lets you read the latest Tweets posted from Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia.



You can select to view the latest Tweets from the individual countries and sit back and watch as the latest Twitter messages from that country are shown on a Google Map.



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Follow the Eighth Marines on Google Maps

One-Eight Basetrack is an experimental media project, tracking the deployment of 1/8 – 1st Battalion, Eighth Marines, throughout the duration of their deployment to southern Afghanistan. A small team of mobile media operators is embedded with the battalion, transmitting their reports and reflections from Helmand province as they travel across the battalion’s area of operations.



The project is using Google Maps with the SIMILE Timeline to provide a navigation aide to the videos, photographs and posts collected by the team on the ground.



The videos of the marines serving their tour of duty in Afghanistan are particular powerful. As photographer Teru Kuwayama says the project creates "a pipeline between 1,000 Marines working in very austere, isolated conditions in southern Afghanistan and connects them to their mothers, their fathers, their wives, their girlfriends, their husbands and their kids."



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The London Riots & Social Equality

In the UK I think it is now illegal to try and connect the recent rioting with social deprivation or economic inequality. The government and the mainstream media has decided that unless you blame bad parenting, social networking sites or a breakdown of moral order for the riots then you should be publicly castigated as a supporter and excuser of wanton criminality.



The Centre of Full Employment and Equity seem to be ignoring this new political orthodoxy by creating a Google Map overlaying the location of riot incidents on top of unemployment data.



The British Local Unemployment and the August 2011 Riots Map includes two layers: the local area unemployment rate range and riot incident data from the UK Guardian Open Data Blog.



The dark blue areas on the map show areas with high employment rates. At the risk of encouraging a visit from the UK thought police I have to say that the areas with high employment rates seem to have been largely unaffected by the recent rioting.



The Guardian themselves have used the riot incident data to create a Riots & Poverty Data Map.







The Guardian says that "The darker reds represent poorer places, the blues are the richer areas. What do you think? Is there a correlation between the two?" I'm going to say it - 'Yes, there is'.



Someone has also taken a KML from the London Riots - Verified Areas map and displayed it on MapTube Map with the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). The IMD is a method of identifying deprived areas across the UK.







Overlaying the locations of the riots and looting on top of the IMD layer reveals that most of the trouble is occurring more in areas with high deprivation than in more affluent locations.



Curating Geodata from Social Media to Map the London Riots:

Whilst we are on the subject of the UK riots Directions Magazine has a good podcast discussion looking at the challenge of using social media as geodata and what journalists, geospatial professionals and the public can learn from these efforts.





OK, with that done we can now get back to blaming the parents and Twitter.



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The Rise and Fall of American Newspapers

For the last few years Paper Cuts has been documenting layoffs and buyouts at U.S. newspapers with the help of Google Maps.



This year's map from Paper Cuts already shows over 2,500 layoffs at newspapers throughout the country. As newspaper readership and advertising revenues continue to dwindle I suspect Paper Cuts will become busier and busier mapping the loss of newspaper jobs and newspapers.





Whilst Paper Cuts seems to be mapping the decline of American newspapers The Growth of U.S. Newspapers has created a great map visualisation that documents the growth of newspapers in the U.S. over three centuries.



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The visualisation from Stanford University plots the growth of newspapers since the publication of 'Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick' in Boston in 1690. It is possible to filter the data shown on the map by date, language of publication and by frequency of publication.

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Local Bay News on Google Maps

The California Newspapers Partnership has released an iPad app that uses Google Maps to present local news for the Bay Area in California. The app presents coupons, events, restaurant and other business listings, and feature stories, photos and video on a Google Map of the Bay Area.

The application includes three main modes. 'On tap' presents the day's local news and local deals. 'Explore' uses Google Maps to present local events. The third mode, 'Find,' allows users to search the application for news, deals and other features.

The app is currently free but there are plans to charge a monthly subscription fee in the future.

TapIn (iTunes link)

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An Asian in New York

The latest U.S. census has revealed that for the first time the number of Asians in New York has topped one million. This means that now nearly 1 in 8 New Yorkers are Asian.

This Google Map from the New York Times shows the distribution of the Asian population in New York by country of origin. You can refine the data shown on the map by country and you can also view the New York Times' summary of a number of districts via the links in the sidebar.

Asians in New York City

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Deaths in Afghanistan by U.S. State

Afghanistan Casualties and Deaths by U.S. State

The Guardian has used Fusion Tables to create a map to show the number of casualties and deaths suffered by each U.S. state in the ten years of the war in Afghanistan.

The map lets you click on the map to view the details of deaths and casualties for the selected state. It is also possible to view a heat map for a number of different data sets.

The drop-down menu at the top of the map allows you to select the data for the number of soldiers killed in action, killed not in action, wounded in action and deaths as a percentage of state population.

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Animal Cruelty on Google Maps

Factory Farm Investigations Mapped

Animal Visuals has used Google Maps to show the locations of factory farms that animal protection groups have exposed for cruelty to animals. The map displays farms where animals have been found to be living in filthy conditions,intensively confined for their entire lives and other 'criminal acts of animal torture'.

The map also highlights the states that have drafted agriculture gagging legislation, that if passed will impose criminal penalties for creating audio or visual recordings of agriculture operations.

If you click on any of the animal map markers you can click through to view the video of the undercover investigation carried out by animal protection groups at that farm.

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Death Inequality on Google Maps

Her bliver du ældst

Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet has created a Google Map to highlight death inequality in the country.

As in many countries, where you live in Denmark can affect how long you live. For example, in Hørsholm Kommune the average age of death is 80 years old whilst in Lolland the average age of death is five years less at 75 years old.

Ekstra Bladet has created a choropleth map to highlight the average age of death in each Danish municipality. The redder the shade then the lower the life expectancy in that area. If you live in an area shaded green then you have a better chance of having a long life.

Hat-tip: microformats.dk

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UK Ethnicity on Google Maps

Ethnic Breakdown for England and Wales

In the UK the Office for National Statistics has released data showing how many people from each ethnic group are estimated to live where across England and Wales. The Guardian has used the data to create this Google Map.

It is possible to select the ethnic group you wish to view on the map from a drop-down menu. The map then updates to show the percentages of that group living across England and Wales.

The Guardian received a lot of negative comments for it's Google Map of the UK Alternative Vote Referendum a couple of weeks ago. Readers were very unimpressed that the AV map didn't have a map key. The Guardian seem to have listened to the criticisms and for this map have provided a key that updates automatically for each ethnic group selected.

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Open Local News with Google Maps

n0tice

n0tice is an open community platform using Google Maps to help bring you local news, events and listings.

When you first load n0tice the application asks to detect your location. If you agree to share your location a Google Map will open showing nearby news. You can then zoom in or out to see more general or more precise news to your location.

You can use n0tice to post your own news, events and listings and the first person to post in a particular city becomes the Editor of that city. You can also become the Editor of a city by becoming the most active poster in the city.

Users can add links to any story or post a photo or embed a video to improve the post. n0tice also comes with both read and write API's.

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