If you thought you couldn’t use the Google Maps API any more as a journalist, this update to the Google Geo Developers Blog should make you reconsider. From Nieman Journalism Lab: “Certain web apps will be given blanket exemptions from charging. Here’s Google: “Maps API applications developed by non-profit organisations, applications deemed by Google to be in the public interest, and
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Richard Pope and Jordan Hatch have been building a very useful site tracking recent budget cuts, building up to this week’s spending review. Where Are The Cuts? uses the code behind the open source Ushahidi platform (covered previously on OJB by Claire Wardle) to present a map of the UK representing where cuts are being felt. Users can submit their
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PriceOfWeed.com is a great example of when you need to turn to crowdsourcing to obtain data for your journalism. As Paul Kedrosky writes, it’s “Not often that you get to combine economics, illicit substances, map mashups and crowd-sourcing in one post like this.” The resulting picture is surprisingly clear. And news organisations could learn a lot from the way this has
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Last night OpenHeatMap creator Pete Warden announced that the tool now allowed you to visualise UK data. I’ve been gleefully playing with the heat-mapping tool today and thought I’d share some pointers on visualising data on a map. This is not a tutorial for OpenHeatMap – Pete’s done a great job of that himself (video below) – but rather an outline
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The following is cross-posted from Claire Wardle’s blog: Late on Monday night, I wrote a short post in anticipation of the crowdmap I’d just set up for BBC London, which I hoped would provide a useful service the following day for the London tubestrike, 7th September 2010. It’s now Wednesday morning, and I can write, while still feeling slightly shell-shocked
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This is one of the best BBC projects I’ve seen in a while: Dimensions maps key events, places and things such as the Pakistan floods, the Gulf oil spill and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – over your postcode. It’s a simple idea, but hugely effective. The prototype comes not from the corporation’s News arm – it was commissioned by History. Commissioning
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(Read part 1 here and part 2 here) The third student to catch the data journalism bug was Andy Brightwell. Through his earlier reporting on swimming pool facilities in Birmingham, Andy had developed an interest in the issue, and wanted to use data journalism techniques to dig further. The result was a standalone site – Where Can We Swim? –
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Last month the first submissions by students on the MA in Online Journalism landed on my desk. I had set two assignments. The first was a standard portfolio of online journalism work as part of an ongoing, live news project. But the second was explicitly branded ‘Experimental Portfolio‘ – you can see the brief here. I wanted students to have a
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