We have a Google Mapplet proof of concept for the project. It's a lightweight method but has the potential to be fleshed out a lot depending on what our options are.
Right now it grabs the most recent 100 tweets to #votereport and searches for messages that contain at least one other hash tag as well as a location. The location can be a zip5, zip5+4, or arbitrary string enclosed in brackets, such as "[austin, texas]". It then geocodes the location and displays a marker on the map with the hash tags and optionally a comment (everything after the first semicolon).
Add it here: http://maps.google.com/ig/add?synd=mpl&pid=mpl&moduleurl=http://votereport.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/votereport.xml
Within the Mapplets system it's possible to add a bunch of customizations. Iframe-embedding, icons for the different tags, searching, summary charts, auto-refreshing, additional feeds, caching, etc. If we have a dedicated database that can store all the data and cache the geocoded results it could probably scale pretty well.
Note: if you install the Developer Mapplet you can reload a mapplet during testing.
Want to help out? Join the Google Code project at http://code.google.com/p/votereport/ to report issues, hack code, and figure out how it should work.
Resources
Google Mapplets Developer Guide: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/guide.html
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.