Social Design Notes has written up a Flash-based interactive map of global indymedia sites. This is interesting in and of itself -- it never hurts to have direct links to outside-the-mainstream media sources around the world. The map is easy to use and relatively self-explanatory -- drag a box to select a region, click a country to zoom in, click to dot to jump to the indymedia page. Useful, to be sure... but that's not the really cool part.
SDN is also making the application, with maps, available for download as datafiles, for others to use as they see fit. They ask for $10 if you'll be using it as part of a for-profit enterprise, otherwise the material is free (but not Free, as the source Flash code does not appear to be included). US and UK/Ireland maps are available as well, along with alternative examples of map/data combinations. Best of all, there are detailed instructions as to how to use all of this to make your own interactive maps to put up on your website.
I'm eager to poke around through the datafiles -- I wonder how easy it would be to create a WorldChanging Map, with map-based links to stories set in particular regions...
Comments (3)
You might also want to have a look at worldKit at http://brainoff.com/worldkit/index.php - it's a Flash app that lets you map content from RSS feeds that are tagged with lat/lon data.
Posted by Allan Doyle | February 5, 2005 3:35 PM
Posted on February 5, 2005 15:35
Just tag your stories with latitude and longitude and build a Moveable Type template to output an XML file.
New features are also in the works - the next release will let you configure dot color, size, and transparency, and load custom images for icons.
Posted by John | February 5, 2005 5:59 PM
Posted on February 5, 2005 17:59
A pitty that it's made in Flash. That doesn't make sense since it's related to indymedia.
Flash is proprietary, you'll need windows, a mac or linux to see it. It makes the websites huge and unaccessable for the poor non broadband user. It requires you to use one of the big n slow webbrowsers and thus is also not viewable on older hardware.
That's a shame. It could be made with normal imagemaps.
Posted by gunnix | February 7, 2005 7:39 AM
Posted on February 7, 2005 07:39