A year or two back Pandora was taken away from us in the UK. At the time I wrote that there are very few entities in the universe that are more powerful than a hoard of geeks armed with a handful of programming languages and an uncanny ability to find a back door. In this case an IP proxy address.
The sentiment is still true and getting stronger. The number of web applications is brilliant and my personal favourite is currently Google Maps. It allows you to add so much depth to a story tracking where things happen and monitoring trends and changes.
A great example of this comes from The Business Insider. In the piece Nicolas Carlson tracks the many job losses from US newspapers in the first four months of 2009 using the free Google Maps tool and the resulting image, well, to use an awful cliche it’s worth a thousand words.
The image, tracking the 8862+ layoffs and buyouts from US newspapers can be seen here.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.