It's always exciting when several people get together to make a map. Collaboration can really bear the best fruit sometimes. My Blue Planet is a Swiss project that is doing what it can to raise environmental awareness. One of its projects is helping people get copies of "The Inconvenient Truth" to watch, and they have a map where people can mark things they have done to help to the environment or projects they know about to fight global warming.
Martin Stabe posts a recording of Dan Gillmore's keynote from NMKForum07 where he gives a few examples of citizen media on Platial.
Dan also showed a mashup of homes sold, plotted on a map, showing homes that sold for less than local governments thought they were worth. It was posted not by a journalist but created by a real estate agent who thought it was important. Why don't media people do this? [ here are 2 of these maps, one for boston and one for cape cod ]
I call this journalism just not done by someone who calls themselves a journalist. He showed a map of bombings in Iraq using a site called Platial. His students at Berkeley created this. No newspaper that Dan knows of has done this.
In Bakersfield, they created a pothole map. People could put a pin on the map showing potholes. They could add pictures. They could list potholes that have been fixed.
Istanbul based photographer Mike Mike is building up a collection of facial aggregates that represent the unique flavor of a particular city at a particular moment. The cool thing about this project is that he takes into consideration the distinct character of each place, most of these 'what is the average look of humanity' projects are going for a global merge. My only crit is that it seems incredibly biased towards young adults, there isn't a representation of older populations, even for cities with higher proportions of older people.
What about a guessing game? Who can guess the cities of these 3 examples?
The Happy Planet Index (HPI) doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world. It shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens. The nations that top the Index aren’t the happiest places in the world, but the nations that score well show that achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources is possible.
They have a slick flash app that shows you specific stats.
Get Happy Y'all, without thrashing everything.
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