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 15 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).

Here's how you add it right now:

* Go to http://maps.google.com/ig/directory?synd=mpl&pid=mpl

* Click "Add by URL" next to the search button.

* Add http://chrisken.googlepages.com/votereport.xml

* Go back to maps.google.com, click the "My Maps" tab and enable it if it isn't already.

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.