The NYTimes online site has done a nice job of apparently utilizing some Google Map tools to gather and report news of the transit strike and related citizen stories.  See the “Interactive Feature” on the NYT opening page.

Tamara Thompson provides yet another good pointer:

~ researching private companies ~

By Tamara Thompson Investigations

Bird's eye view maps have long been an interesting perspective for mapmakers and users of maps.  (They have also been a splendid tool for hyping real estate and city development on America's spread to the west, but that's a story for another day.)  Comes today this interesting resource at http://ccablog.blogspot.com/2005/12/birds-eye-views.html

Tom
Patterson of the U. S. National Park Service has published a 32 page
paper on the creation of bird's eye views. The paper, published in
NACIS’ fall issue of Cartographic Perspectives, is available on his Shaded Relief website and is in pdf format. Also available are numerous examples.
From the abstract: “A brief historical review looks at the antecedents
of current NPS products dating back to the Renaissance. The practical
second half of the paper focuses on how the NPS now designs these
bird’s-eye views with 3D software, with an eye toward cost savings.
Topics include viewing parameters in a 3D scene, preparing DEMs,
modeling buildings, designing trees, and creating environmental special
effects.” Patterson points out in his paper that “If the output from 3D
software has a visual fault it is the tendency for it to look
hyper-realistic—too smooth, shiny, and simulated.” The paper contains
numerous tips for the creation of a realistic bird’s eye illustration.”

Thanks again to the http://ccablog.blogspot.com/

From “Cartography,” the Canadian Cartography Association's most
excellent blog at http://ccablog.blogspot.com/

“The self-declared goal of the Map Projections web page 'is to present on-line, as complete a collection as possible, historical published map projections.' Currently there are over 300 such examples, all as black line drawings in pdf format, classed into 7 categories. The map projections were produced using personally developed computer programs, some of which is available for download or by way of email request (see About – in pdf format).”
For the Map Projection page, see
http://www.ilstu.edu/microcam/map_projections/

The LLRX newsletter reports:

Old
and New

THOMAS, the legislative Web site from the
Library of Congress, has received its second facelift in the space of a year.
(For information on the previous set of tweaks, see my January 2005 column
THOMAS: New Congress, A Few
Changes.) The latest redesign, announced in a November 2005
press release, does
not add much substantial content or functionality but gives THOMAS an updated
look similar to the main Library of Congress web
site and a consistent site-wide navigation scheme that certainly was needed.

Beth Kopine, Resource Center Director at the Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., has done some fast and insightful work creating a page of digital resources that will assist anyone in covering the NY City transit strike, and any other, for that matter.  See “IRE and NICAR Resource Page: NY Transit Strike”

Gerry Lanosga, an investigative producer at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, was kind enough to send along this link — http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~markane/i590/contributors.html to a nifty first shot at merging GoogleMaps with The Fundrace Project., that site that shows you who in any ZIP Code made contributions to which politicians.  Matthew Kane, a CS student at the Univ. of Indiana, put this together, and it's a fine beginning.  Be alert, however, that the Fundrace data is not always correct.  For example, we know a guy named John T. Johnson, who lives in ZIP 87505, fairly well.  The Fundrace Project says he is an airline pilot who works for UPS.  We know for sure that is not the case. 

The drill-down on Kane's 
Following the Dollars doesn't give the degree of detail that the Fundrace Project does itself, but keep on truckin',  Mr. Kane.  We need all of these utilities we can get.

The non-US press is picking up on the story of “rendition” flights, those special charters hauling folks — apparently always males — who have been kidnapped by the CIA and handed over to other nations for, um, “interrogation.”  While The Washington Post has gotten perhaps a bit too-much credit for breaking the story, the first reporter on it was Joachim Dyfvermark, a reporters for TV4 in Sweden.  Now the French newspaper Le Mode is on the case.  See “On the track of the hidden activities of the CIA in Europe”  The maps on the site would seem to indicate that Algiers is a popular stop-over with Germany an equally popular destination, presumably for hand-off.

Ran across this today: “The Headmap Manifesto — Know Your Place –
Headmap manifesto and the spatialised internet revolution.” See http://www.sirc.org/articles/know_your_place.shtml  Even though it's more than a year old, just the phrase “Headmap Manifesto” would seem to have potential.




Headmap fits neatly with another collaborative thinking/organizing tool we've started to investigate, CmapTools, a online, shareable concept mapping utility.




Seems to us that if/when we merge the concepts of Headmap, CmapTools and “First Mile,” something's going on that suggests major change in the offing.

We
don't know if there has as yet been any empirical research done on how
interested media consumers are in online crime mapping — and how good the coverage is —  but there is a body of
literature debating readers' interest in crime per se.  It would
seem to be a pretty good bet, though, that if people are interested in
crime AND if more and more are going online via broadband, that
some dynamic crime maps would get some hits. 

See, too: Paulsen, Derek J.  “WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF HOMICIDE IN SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTING DANGEROUS PLACES.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 9(3) (2002) 113-127