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If said light map wannabe *interactively* overlays iPhone to Android to Blackberry adoption in your own neighborhood, you can still learn a thing or two:
https://www.mapbox.com/labs/tw...
Correlating iPhone and blackberry adoptions to high vs low class income areas to your expectations / preconeptions of your "poor" neighborhood and seeing if the map matches them is neat.

Looking at rent price differences graphically if you don't even live in Manhattan also provides some education and amusement http://www.housingmaps.com/
I wish there were more projects like these.

HousingMaps.com has been doing this for something like 5 years. I'm sure there are probably others like it too.

Well, it's not really a "map of disease"
breakouts. In fact the map part is rather just
a shiny pony?

A list could have done just the same amount
of good. Since for the most part each area has
one pushpin that just sums up the area.
[FWIW, I only looked at US pins.]

I was expecting a cluster map, like you see on...
Wunderground Wundermaps

or on...
http://www.housingmaps.com/

At least if it was a cluster map I could
look at an area and think, "I sure as heck
ain't traveling there for work this week."

I think if public interaction would be
allowed, that would turn up the dial to
a more 'fine' resolution rather than the
grainy "Cryptosporidium in local pools"
that I already know about cause I read
the local paper. Or that the measles
outbreak is almost contained. I can get
that from the 10pm news.

That further detracts from the usefulness
of this website as it stands, because I
doubt someone that reads the news less
than I do, would be more likely to go to
a website and search what new diseases
popped up this week. [All hypochondriacs
aside]

It's a good seed/foundation as long as
they have the financial stamina to keep
it going.

-AI

I understand being jaded about internet hype and buzzwords but I'm still surprised that after nearly eighty comments there doesn't seem to be anyone who has anything to say other than "vaporware" and "it won't work because of the spammers." Yes, maybe it has been overhyped and yes it is taking a while for the envisioned ideas to come to fruition but that doesn't mean that those ideas aren't worthwhile.

I'll use the following example because I recently had to do this with non semantic tools. Lets say you wanted to see how good or bad a job a transit agency is doing in its city in comparison to other similar cities. A couple of metrics you might use to find similar cities would be population size, population density and land area. Google doesn't do a good job with something like that. You end up needing to search for cities individually and then finding their data points. Or you can find a list of cities ranked by population or population density. If you search on Google for something like that you end up at one of the Wikipedia lists. These lists are helpful but....still lacking. They don't contain all the cities you need or they don't provide a way to look at multiple data sets at the same time. The lists are also compiled by hand and aren't automatically updated when the information on the city page is changed. The data is in wikipedia though. Every city page lists that information in a little box near the start of the article. But how do I take this data that is in Wikipedia from the form that its in into a form that I can use to find what I need to know? Enter the semantic web.

Lets say that wikipedia, or at least the parts dealing with geography, were semantic. Now, there are tens of thousands of pages describing countries, regions, states, counties, parishes, cities, towns and villages. Then those pages are translated into many other languages. Some of the data that these pages contain is of the same type . They all contain the name of the locality, latitude, longitude, size, population size and elevation. For data such as this it would be pretty easy to have a form to enter the data into as opposed using the usual markup and the form could put the data into the proper markup for the page and the proper RDF. Once the data is in proper RDF form it would be easy to automate the process of updating translations of that page with the new data as well as updating any pertinent lists. It would also make it easier for people who want to analyze or use the data because they would be able to access it much more easily.

But nobody really wants machine readable access to this information, you might say, except for the random geek and researcher. I would disagree. Lets say you're using a program like Marble which is similar to Google Earth in some ways but is completely open source. If they wanted to display the population of a city when you hover over it they would currently have to create and maintain their own dataset or they'd have to write a parser to extract it from wikipedia. Neither of those options is particularly easy at the moment but if the information was in semantic form on wikipedia it would be a piece of cake.

The strength of the semantic web isn't, in my opinion, going to be AI like personal agents or anything like that. It'll be things that in many ways are already here. Like Yelp putting geotags on the restaurants they reviews and apps like Google Earth taking that data thats available in machine readable (Semantic!) for to overlay that data on a map so that you can see whats nearby. It'll be applications doing the same with the geotags from flickr. Its really useful mashups like http://www.housingmaps.com/. Its the transit agency putting realtime bus data up in semantic form so you can see on your iphones google map how far away the bus is. So yeah, maybe the semantic web is overhyped but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of substance there, too.

Cheers,
Greg

Wikipedia has an article on the subject, and suggests mapping Craiglist listings on a Google Maps map as an example of a mashup.

So does Wikipedia also link to HousingMaps.com , or just talk about it as if it didn't already exist? (No, I'm not gonna bother finding the article to see; this is a good excuse to get the link out there to the peeps.)

Someone already made this, it mashes up the data from Craigslist apartment listings with a map from Google Maps. Housing Maps. It's pretty cool, when I stumbled on it I had one of those why-didn't-I-think-of-that moments.

Direct link to Houston listings.

Someone already made this, it mashes up the data from Craigslist apartment listings with a map from Google Maps. Housing Maps. It's pretty cool, when I stumbled on it I had one of those why-didn't-I-think-of-that moments.

Direct link to Houston listings.

i saw this picture on yahoo news earlier in the day.

then, as i was scrolling around the map randomly, i recognized the spot when i saw it again here!

it might be helpful (or at least interesting) to be able to map photos to their location on the map somehow, kind of like this

It seems to me that they will let people use Google Maps as long as you do not create a "new product" with it. "New product" meaning anything completely modifying the spirit, functionnality or appearance or Google Maps.
If you only use Google Maps to display locations on a map (like http://www.housingmaps.com/ or http://www.cytadia.us/ to take a real estate example) you should be fine. If you extract data from the maps to create a new service (i.e. a wallpaper) you'll be in trouble. It all seems reasonable to me.
The other thing they might/could look (to see if they should shutdown a site or not) is the location of the javascripts you're using to interact with maps. Is it from their servers or is it a modified, "custom" version ?

i hope my favorite mashup, google housing, that uses the craigslist rental pages won't get taken down!!

http://www.housingmaps.com/