You’re absolutely right. These kinds of maps give actual value to crime/fire stories. Mashup maps that show me where the crimes and fires have been over the last year help me decide where to live, work, send my children to school…

You’re putting information into context. That’s news. Journalists who don’t want to do that are lazy.

“Just another numbers story?” My life is my salary, my mortgage, my taxes, my car payment, my savings, my checkbook, the value of houses in my neighborhood… numbers are everything.

Great, great work.

Actually, I think that’s true of any statistical information — like Adrian Holovaty showed with ChicagoCrime, another great Google Maps mashup.

Too often reporters and editors ignore these opportunities to cover ongoing trends because it would be “just another boring numbers story.” Well yeah, it will be if you don’t put any thought into it, or apply any new interactive tools to it!

I think these kinds of mashups have a lot of potential to revitalize coverage of local issues that have become drastically under-covered because they just aren’t exciting in traditional text narrative form.

IMHO, of course.

- Amy Gahran

the home pictured in that screenshot, even in the nicest neighborhoods, would run you about 25% less.

even the mansions along lakeshore are taking their lumps this time around with many on the market for over a year and prices reduced every few months.

of course, we don’t have a huge zipper that runs halfway thru town like the fine folks pictured above.