TUTORIAL: How to create an interactive map for your readers – for dummies like me
Geo-location, crowdsourcing, collaborative journalism... these are some of the buzz words of our business right now and it's quite an adventure getting your head into all of these trends and finding ways to apply them in every day journalism.
One of the most obviously useful applications is to create an interactive map where your readers can contribute information which has a geographic context. Say you wanted to map potholes in your community, or have a tool to report broken street lights and so on? This would be very useful.
Google Maps provides some powerful technology for online mapping and it's really easy to whip up a map illustrating a series of stories or an unfolding trend, but, unless you are a programmer, it can be a heck of a lot more difficult to create a map that your users can help build. The Google Map API is incredibly powerful but if, like me, you are not a programmer's bottom, you need to find other ways as a journalist to get things moving.