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 been executed. Although the default map view is of the US, the site detects your location and offers you prices nearest to you. It’s searchable and browsable. Sadly, the raw data isn’t available – although it would be relatively straightforward to scrape it.

As the site expands globally it is also adding extra data on the social context – tolerance and  law enforcement. (via)