Mapping and interactive communication
Eleventh Hour (film) action web site. Note small number of meet-ups on map. This is not always the most effective way of generating in-person action.
The idea was to emphasize how close, and how widespread, the mountaintop destruction had become. Appalachian Voices also makes YouTube videos available and links them inside the web pages.
Here major sites from the American Instistute of Architects "Blueprint for America" projects are displayed.
Google enables people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, similarly to a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML. To embed a Google Map, users will simply pull up the map they want to embed--it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map they have created--and then click 'Link to this page' and copy and paste the HTML into their Web site or blog.
Google Earth also allows people to embed all kinds of information, graphics, links, and videos within the site node. Here Appalachian Voices points out what has happened to Kayford Mountain, one of hundreds razed for coal production in the Appalachians.
TrafficLand.com aggregates traffic monitors in cities all over the world. This was a Sunday morning in late September, 2007.
Emotion mapping or biomapping -- Gavanic skin response meter with readings every 4 seconds, correlated with GPS position, reflected as altitude data above the basic map.
See link for technical information.
Above, one persons experience on one day in one part of London from Google Earth. Below, a peak associated with a traffic crossing. Biomapping.net
OK, so if you ever get bored ... Go in close and spin GoogleEarth, and then try to figure out where you have landed.
Here my 15 year old and I started in Edinborough and "landed" here. We followed endless rivers to try to find civilization. Not much luck. We gave up, zoomed out, and found we were looking at a map of Siberia.
Links:
Tools and Terrain software / First class overview by the Virtual Terrain Project
C:rime Maps
Chicago -- http://www.chicagocrime.org/