Howard Rheingold's Library tagged mapping →  View Popular

"In the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, unnamed streets meander through the hillsides. There are hospitals, coffee shops and restaurants, none of which appear on a map, and mail carriers struggle to get letters to homes without addresses.

A new project by Rede Jovem, a Brazilian nonprofit that loosely translates to "Youth Net," seeks to change that. With the help of five young "wiki-reporters" and GPS-equipped mobile phones, the nonprofit is building a map of five Brazilian favelas: Complexo do Alemão, Cidade de Deus, Morro do Pavão-Pavãozinho, Morro Santa Marta and Complexo da Maré. By uploading information to the phones, the reporters are mapping the unmapped, one road and cafe at a time.

"The main goal was to mark public interest spots on a map and show places like schools and institutions and hospitals and restaurants," said Natalia Santos, the executive coordinator for Rede Jovem. "We wanted to spread the news about what slums do have, so all the people can get to know that the slum is not just a place for violence and marginality and robbery.""

mobileactive.org/...rede-jovem-wikimapa - Preview

ict wiki mapping mobile_devices

"An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, mashups and tools being influenced by Google Maps."

googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/...iday-fun-with-google-maps.html - Preview

mapping

"Beginning graduate art school in this climate of estranged familiarity, I found myself obsessing over place and its heavily layered meanings. I made a map of my neighborhood, intending to mark it with stories of people I had known, but quickly ran out of space. I made another map, this time filling it with anecdotes of memories situated in the place.

Finding that I was questioning the accuracy of my memories, I mapped “Things I don’t remember right,” followed by places present, changed and gone. “The Visceral Neighborhood" (above) maps maps my emotional landscape.

Fifteen map versions later, I felt nowhere near finished mapping my own experiences. Looking at the depth of my relationship to this corner of the city, the vastness of the project I had undertaken began to become clear. This place, and every place, is both a vessel for and a vital character in the lives lived within it. My experience of the neighborhood had already filled fifteen maps, but it only scratched the surface of a vast social archeology waiting to be uncovered within the blocks surrounding my house.

I began to seek the participation of my neighbors, strangers and friends with whom I share this space. The intersection of my important places with the narratives of other lives lived in the neighborhood reveals an intrinsic connection to people I didn’t think I knew."

shareable.net/...the-visceral-neighborhood - Preview

mapping

"
Throwing a few markers on an interactive map? That's so last year. The next generation of online maps or bigger, bolder and incredibly detailed. They provide a unique service to the viewer and push the envelope of data visualization and the distribution of information."

www.10000words.net/...nique-and-innovative-maps.html - Preview

mapping comm217

"Take any kind of street address list, for example copied from Excel, and geocode the addresses to get latitude and longitude coordinates using the tool below. The data can then be mapped in your browser, downloaded into Google Earth, saved to a web page, or transferred back into your spreadsheet. You can also use this tool to calculate distances to multiple addresses from a single point, or get quick driving directions to multiple destinations. Mapping multiple locations with your own custom data takes seconds, just follow the 6 steps below to plot your own data on a fully interactive multi-point map. It's fast, easy, and - free to use!"

www.batchgeocode.com/ - Preview

mapping

Create custom Google Maps from your geotagged Flickr Photosets to embed in your website or blog, or for sending to friend's Facebook, Twitter or your favourite website.

imapflickr.com/default.aspx - Preview

flickr mashups mapping

Mapmaking site

www.mapbuzz.com - Preview

mapping

BuildingBulletins aims to replace traditional bulletin board classifieds that you might find in the lobby of any building. It wants to turn every building into its own social community. By using the site you can connect with the other people in your buildings and create social communities.

The site uses Google Maps to show the location of buildings already connected through BuildingBulletins. The map includes a search engine so you can find if your building has already been entered on the site. If not you can put it on the map yourself.

Selecting a building from the map will take you to that building's dedicated page where you can start or join discussions, plan meets or review the building. The dedicated page also has a Google Map which shows nearby points of interest.

googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/...ommunities-on-google-maps.html - Preview

mapping community

Almost four decades after Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the rate of water pollution violations is rising steadily. In the past five years, companies and workplaces have violated pollution laws more than 500,000 times. But the vast majority of polluters have escaped punishment.
Clean Water Act Violations

A survey of states found many violations and little enforcement.
Find Water Polluters Near You

Search data on more than 200,000 facilities around the nation permitted to discharge pollutants.

projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters - Preview

mapping

Interestingly, there are a lot of grassroot initiatives offered, which are often developed and maintained by a few people and sometimes even one person who accomplishes much more.

1. Tunesia Prison Map
Sami Ben Gharbia put up together, already a while ago, the frightening Tunesia prison map, in which he has been using google maps. It shows where political dissidents have been locked up by the Tunisian government.
2. Theyworkforyou
They work for you was developed by Rob McKinnon, whom I had the change to meet back in London. This inspiring project has a sister in the UK “that aims to make it easy for people to track the activity of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament.” Basically, this site aggregates information already available in a form that makes it more transparent to follow the engagement of parliamentarians and topics. I am really impressed about his work and looking forward to see more of his ideas realized in the future.
3. UNdemocracy
This is again a website which aggregates available information and offers it in a transparent way. It focuses on an easy access to the transcripts of the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations. The same people also did the Public Whip, a page tracking the voting record and attendance of parliamentarians in the UK.
4. Ushahidi
This website was quickly realized through the recent Kenya crisis and maps the reports of the post-election crisis with all its different incidents such as riots, deaths, property loss, government forces etc. Kenyians can report such cases through their mobile phones by sms. This truly is a bottom up mashup.
5. Mapping the election conditions in Zimbabwe
bild-2.png
This is a similar initiative, which documents all types of manipulation during the latest Zimbabweans election. The map is a valauble resource and Sokwanele has been doing an impressive work for human rights throughout the the last years. Ethan Zuckerman wrote an in depth post about this project.
6. Healthcarethatworks

www.crisscrossed.net/...sroot-mashups-for-transparency - Preview

mapping

t is estimated as much as 80% of data contains geo-referenced information. So, a lot of information can be displayed through maps. Digital maps allow easy ways to present large amounts of data and reduce complexity. Activists have found creative ways to use maps, but also development organizations have to deal with a lot of spatial information. Using geo-referenced through maps can improve transparency, and yet not so many organizations use it.

Difference of digital maps
Digital maps have brought three major changes.

1. Digital maps, in contrast to paper maps, can be combined with all kinds of data even in real time.
2. Nowadays, everybody can access huge data from the public domain and combine these with maps.
3. Citizen maps are created through voluntarily worldwide effort and participation, are freely available and offer new ways for transparency.

www.crisscrossed.net/...sm-transparency-and-engagement - Preview

mapping

Google today announced that Google Maps can now display live traffic data for more roads. Until now, Google only showed data from major highways. That data came directly from local highway authorities, but now, Google will also tap into data it receives from GPS-enabled phones that use Google Maps with the My Location feature. As users move around a city, Google can see how well traffic is flowing along any road and will update its live traffic data accordingly.

www.readwriteweb.com/..._crowdsources_traffic_data.php - Preview

mapping geospatial

An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, mashups and tools being influenced by Google Maps.

googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/...y-fun-with-google-maps_14.html - Preview

mapping

Stamen Design has just launched San Francisco Crimespotting, an interactive map of crimes in San Francisco and companion to Oakland Crimespotting launched in 2007.

laughingsquid.com/map-of-crimes-in-san-francisco - Preview

mapping comm217

Crisis Mapping is by definition a cross-disciplinary field. Crises can be financial, ecological, humanitarian, etc., but these crises all happen in time and space, and necessarily interact with social networks. There may thus be much to gain from learning how different fields such as health, environment, biology, etc., visualize and analyze large complex sets of data to detect and amplify or dampen specific patterns.

We can’t all become specialists in each others’ area of expertise but we can learn from each other, especially if we share a common language. Like the field of complexity science, Crisis Mapping can provide a common but malleable language, taxonomy and conceptual framework to facilitate the exchange of insights driven by innovative thinking in diverse fields.

This explains why I was excited to come across the International Journal of Health Geographics a few days ago.

irevolution.wordpress.com/...mapping-and-health-geographics - Preview

mapping

Adrian Holovaty interview details how he put together Everyblock

www.fimoculous.com/...post-3860.cfm - Preview

mapping mashups comm217

File this one under “intensely counterintuitive.” A recent study has found that closing off certain streets can actually relieve traffic congestion.

Using Google Maps, a trio of scientists – Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Michael Gastner, of the Santa Fe Institute – looked at traffic routes in Boston, New York, and London. Their paper, titled “The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control” [PDF] and published in the journal Physical Letters, found that, when individual drivers seek the quickest route, they sometimes end up slowing things down for everybody.

It all hinges on something called Braess’s Paradox (and yes, I appreciate the irony of a Wikipedia entry that challenges the wisdom of crowds), which states that adding capacity to a network in which all the moving entities rationally seek the most efficient route can sometimes reduce the network’s overall efficiency.

features.csmonitor.com/...does-closing-roads-cut-delays - Preview

mapping visualization collective_intelligence

ESRI has matched the price Google, Yahoo and other mapping providers have been charging for their APIs. The leading GIS company made its JavaScript API (our ESRI JavaScript API profile) completely free. Now the question is: will anyone care?

Though not much of a player in the geoweb, ESRI has been a mainstay of GIS circles for decades. Its software is used in hundreds of government offices and its Shapefile specification was even adopted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2007.

blog.programmableweb.com/...i-to-gain-web-mapping-traction - Preview

mapping

Today the Birmingham Post publishes the first story to come out of the crowdsourcing platform I’ve been creating - Help Me Investigate. It’s about parking ticket hotspots in Birmingham*. UPDATE: The Birmingham Mail have also published a report, from which the map above comes.

onlinejournalismblog.com/...-and-generates-its-first-story - Preview

mapping crowdsourcing comm217

A blog full of strange maps

strangemaps.wordpress.com - Preview

mapping