Brian Robb has created a great little mashup that displays crime data from the city of Ypsilanti, Michigan (USA) on a Google Map interface. This mashup is a good example of how Google Maps mashups don't require a lot of coding and technical knowledge in their creation. Brian, a self-professed "non-programmer" takes crime information in Word format and then runs a manual latitude/longitude lookup to get the coordinates, which is overlaid onto a Google Map. He then lists the maps by week. (I could see small weekly community newspapers performing such a function to display the past week's police calls for their website visitors).
Brian was inspired to create this crime mapping site after seeing and using the trailblazing ChicagoCrime.org but notes "We are only 22,000 residents and there's not as much crime as a city of seven million."
3 comments:
Brian's lucky he lives in Ypsilanti - not Chicago. Good info Morpeth. Do you check this instead of email?
It's a useful site, but the "About" page is almost pretty-much directly plagiarised from my own site, chicagocrime.org.
It's cool to be inspired by another site, but it's not cool to copy text directly like that, especially without attribution.
Is the site down? I'd be interested in the weekly updates.
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