E-flections

Mashing up google maps and news events is a potentially killer app for delivering a better understanding of events on both a local and global scale. Ushahid is a very interesting site that was set up during the post election violence in Kenya to act as an incident reporting and tracking monitor for acts of violence.

anyone who witnesses an incident or has information on it can send in a report and the data is added to both the map and a searchable database: the map can show incidents by type (e.g. arson, rape, murder) and or date. This gives an immediate sense of the scale and distribution of the situation in real time.

One of the pioneers of this type of approach is http://chicago.everyblock.com/ (formerly chicagocrime.org, see the story on its development at http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2008/01/31/0102) which mashes information from police, local government, businesses etc with a detailed city map to provide an amazing amount of useful stuff on local neighbourhoods: from crime rates and types to building permits and more. Founded by Adrian Holovaty, one of the pioneers of interactive online journalism, it has grown to cover New York and San Fransisco as well as Chicago.

This is a viable alternative to making local news exciting, the ability to ‘drill down’ into your local area on a street by street level is tremendously powerful.

This puts me in mind of charlie beckett’s post a few days ago about the parochial yet over the top nature of US news, and how UK local news is no where near as comprehensive, nor as energetic. This kind of mapping of local news trends is a potential answer to the conundrum of how do you package news in an interesting, accessible way without the overblown production values of the local US networks