Interactivity

Sometimes, you just have to "see" a story to get an idea of its scope. Merging video, text, photos and graphics gives such a richer story than just reading an article or watching a video.

StarTribune.com proved the power of this with its "13 Seconds in August" project looking at the I-35 collapse.

Now, the folks at DesMoinesRegister.com have shown us -- in ways made possible only by using the power of the Web -- the terrible damage to a town destroyed by a ferocious tornado. The Des Moines team has assembled graphics, photos, data and stories into an amazingly interactive package that's worthy of emulation.

Charles Apple, at VisualEditors.com, quotes the Registor's data editor, James Wilkerson, about how the project came together:

For base data about the properties, I scraped the county assessor’s web site using a perl script and put the results in a spreadsheet. There were about a thousand records for Parkersburg.

One of our graphics people, Kelli Morris, walked the route of the storm, taking pictures and talking to survivors. She then used the property spreadsheet to link to “after” pictures and built a library of survivor stories from her data and stories we published. We later went through all of the properties for which Kelli had pictures and downloaded the “before” photo from the assessor’s web site.

A parcel map shapefile was not available in a timely and affordable manner. So another graphics person — Craig Johnson — built his by hand. He then built the Flash display using some dummy xml data. Putting Kelli’s spreadsheet in mySQL, I built an xml page in php, which was used to fuel the final display.

The end product is something I believe is truly unique and visually powerful. It also shows what can be accomplished by graphics folks who understand how to use data and think ahead about how to best weave it into their work.

Wonderful example of the power of merging data and multimedia.

Bike versus car (And you can too!)

Apologies to Mr. Colbert on the title.

Wonderful visual presentation of bike-car wrecks from The Oregonian.

We could do it in Charlotte and Raleigh, with information at sites like this one and this one and this one.

I spent about two minutes at the last one and made the (not so pretty) chart shown here. The hard part: The crash data site says, "For a detailed review of crashes in specific locations (e.g., corridors or certain intersections within a community), it will be necessary to obtain such information at the local level."

But it's possible.

Here's another example of mashing up publicly available information to make it useful for readers, from Marc Matteo with McClatchy in California.

Utopian ideas: Foundations could give rewards or grants to creators of such projects so they can take the time to write project "cookbooks" for other papers. Or foundations could fund time for local reporters and graphic artists to develop their own projects, without eviscerating slim newspaper staffs. The ideas are spinning off Ed Wasserman's critique of Propublica.

Map this, the local edition

I thought it only appropriate to point out the use of Google Maps today on today's Charlotte.com story about a fatal shooting in Dilworth.

Details TK.

Putting newspapers on the map

From a story in the U.K.-based Press Gazette:

From the eating habits of herons to homicides in Los Angeles, newspapers are using Google Maps to accompany stories, to get readers involved in reporting those stories and to document events in real time online. ...

The Grantham Journal is using a map to track a rogue heron that has taken a fancy to the town’s pond life. Readers and journalists plot the heron’s whereabouts.

The LA Times has a map documenting every murder on its patch. It is possible to filter the map using various parameters from cause of death to age and race. The map links to photos and comments, and readers can subscribe to customised RSS feeds from the map. ...

There are flight-tracking maps, weather trackers and a blog, Google Maps Mania, dedicated to documenting useful and unusual ways in which the technology is used, including a map that traces the actual locations used in the famous car chase through the streets of San Francisco in the film Bullit. ...

So, how do you get a Google Map on to a newspaper website? Well, you can simply create it and link out to it, as the Grantham Journal does, or you can embed the map into your website by copying the code the map generates. ...

It is technical, but once you understand the basics, it is essentially a copy and paste job. It is possible to include local search within your map, create “mapplets” – which means you can embed externally hosted applications – or overlay information such as road traffic, directions or, as The Daily Telegraph, Grantham Journal and LA Times examples illustrate, anything of very specific interest to your readers.

The Impact of Google Maps

More from this month's Wired: How Google Maps are Changing The Way We See the World
It's one of the cover stories.

"...In the past two years, map providers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have created tools that let anyone with an Internet connection layer their own geographic obsessions on top of ever-more-detailed road maps and satellite images. A host of collaborative annotation projects have appeared — not to mention tens of thousands of personal map mashups — that plot text, links, data, and even sounds onto every available blank space on the digital globe. It's become a sprawling, networked atlas — a "geoweb" that's expanding so quickly its outer edges are impossible to pin down."

Fun with maps

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OK, so with all this hullabaloo over programmer-cum-journalist Adrian Holovaty (He's the guy behind ChicagoCrime.org, a database of crime reported in Chicago. He was at The Washington Post, where he spearheaded projects such as a database on all the votes in Congress since 1991. Oh yeah, he also was awarded more than a million bucks from the Knight Foundation.) I wondered just how difficult it is to incorporate your own data with Google Maps.

I'd always figured that these so-called map mash-ups were for really hard-core programming types. But it's actually relatively easy to create a map, add a couple markers and link those markers to specific content. Obviously, it gets more complicated as you add more markers and make the map more interactive. But the possibilities are endless, and intriguing. It's not difficult to link such a map to an external database or XML file.

It's gotten me to thinking about how little we do to provide added value to Web content. Yes, we sometimes add photos or video, but rarely anything beyond that. We don't generally link to related stories, or archived stories, or even to related third-party content on the Web. We rarely post original source material. We rarely put maps or graphics online, and rarer still do we make those graphics clickable. As a simple example, with just a couple minutes per article, we could include a small Google map with each story locating specific details. For example, a small 100-pixel Google map could've located where the Charleston fire was. Or, we could use the map's polygon overlay to show the route of the funeral procession. Well, you get the idea...

Click on the red markers in the map above for links to some applications of the Google Maps API.