Another nice piece of creativity and innovation comes
along in the Google Earth mashup that depicts not just the U.S.
military deaths in Iraq, but the age and location of those
killed.  This, along with a pop-up of the causality's data, is the
kind of applied JOURNALISM tool university's — and newsrooms — should
be teaching.

“Iraq Conflict Casualties Map in Google Earth

In
response to All Saints/Veterans Day, someone decided to collect and
post a memorial of those who gave their lives so far in the Iraq
conflict from the Americans and Coalition Forces. The author is called
'purblind_horus' at the Google Earth Community and he wanted this to be
as non-political as possible. He wanted to remember those who gave
their lives. He is also working to show the even larger number of
innocent Iraqi's who have lost their lives.

Once you download the war casualties file , you will see placemarks showing the locations of the homes of each soldier. The information came from the official icasualties.org
web site, and includes the 2212 casualties through 27-October-2005. In
addition to the home location of each casualty, if you click on the
placemark it may contain a photo, a link to basic background
information, and links to other information, if available, such as news
stories.

This is a valuable, and sobering, effort. It has been greatly
appreciated by many at the GEC, and I hope some find it worthwhile here
at the GEB as well. Here's the original post. Good work 'purblind_horus'!

Posted by FrankTaylor at November 15, 2005 08:16 AM”